Pentagon's Michael: Anthropic Still a Supply-Chain Risk

"Anthropic is still a designated Supply Chain Risk at @DeptofWar and for the Defense Industrial Base. Thank you for your attention to this matter!" That was Emil Michael, US Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, posting on X on Thursday, per Bloomberg.

The timing is the story. One day earlier, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had told Axios, "We trust Anthropic. They've done what we asked. They're back on the right side." Michael's post reads as a direct rebuttal from inside the same administration.

It also lands after a court loss. On August 27, US District Judge Rita Lin of the Northern District of California issued a 59-page permanent injunction voiding the designation, finding it violated the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment's due process clause. Lin wrote that "the empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics." The administration plans to appeal.

The underlying fight is over how the military can use Claude. Anthropic rebuffed the Pentagon's demand to lift all safeguards on military use of its model, citing concerns about mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. War Secretary Pete Hegseth then blacklisted the company as a national security threat, and Anthropic filed suits in California and Washington, D.C. in March.

This is the latest turn in a run of Anthropic coverage on our tracker, coming days after the Pentagon added ChatGPT Mil and Grok to GenAI.mil while skipping Claude.