Pentagon Tells BBC It Has Stopped Using Anthropic's Claude

"The Pentagon has ceased the use of Anthropic products," a Defense Department official told the BBC on October 5. Multiple sources quoted in the same story said Claude was still running inside the department as recently as last week, including in US military operations against Iran, embedded in Palantir's Maven Smart System.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a supply chain risk in late February and set a six-month phaseout. The dispute followed Anthropic's refusal to give the government assurances its AI would not be used for "fully autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance of Americans."

Pulling Claude out of live classified workflows is apparently harder than striking a vendor from a procurement list. "Once they become integrated it can be painful to remove them," Lauren Kahn of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology told the BBC. Analysts and defence officials rely on Maven to organise visual data including satellite imagery and drone footage, with Claude plumbed in for intelligence analysis.

The contradiction is the story. The on-record statement is a clean break; the on-background sourcing in the same article describes an active deployment inside the Pentagon's dominant intelligence platform.

The rupture has been building for months — this is the 49th military AI item we have logged in the last 90 days — but it is the first with a department official on record calling the Anthropic relationship finished.