Hours after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to halt use of Anthropic’s AI tools, the U.S. military carried out a major airstrike on Iran that reportedly relied on the company’s Claude platform.
Decrypt has reached out to the Department of Defense and Anthropic for comment.
“When AI tools are already embedded in live intelligence and simulation systems, decisions at the top don’t instantly translate to changes on the ground,” Midhun Krishna M, co-founder and CEO of LLM cost tracker TknOps.io, told Decrypt. “There’s a lag—technical, procedural, and human.”
“By the time a model is embedded across classified intelligence and simulation systems, you’re looking at sunk integration costs, retraining, security re-certifications, and parallel testing, so a six-month phase-out may sound decisive, but the real financial and operational burden runs far deeper,” Krishna added.
“Defense agencies will now prioritize model portability and redundancy,” he said. “No serious military operator wants to discover during a crisis that its AI layer is politically fragile.”
"We cannot in good conscience accede to their request," Amodei wrote, after the Defense Department demanded contractors allow their systems for "any lawful use."
Anthropic called the designation "unprecedented" and vowed to challenge it in court, saying it had "never before publicly applied to an American company."
The company added that, to its knowledge, the two disputed restrictions had not affected a single government mission to date.
“The debate isn’t about whether AI will be used in defense, that’s already happening,” Krishna added. “It is whether frontier labs can maintain differentiated guardrails once their systems become operational assets under ‘any lawful use’ contracts.”
Yesterday we reached an agreement with the Department of War for deploying advanced AI systems in classified environments, which we requested they make available to all AI companies.
We think our deployment has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI…
“I don't think Anthropic handled it well either, but as the more powerful party, I hold the government more responsible. I am still hopeful for a much better resolution,” he added.
