Washington (TDI): The United States Treasury Department announced it is terminating all use of Anthropic’s products, including its Claude platform, as part of the federal government disengaging from the company’s technology.
The decision, confirmed Monday by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, follows an order from President Donald Trump for all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s tools, owing to the recent row between Pentagon and Anthropic over military use of AI.
Other key departments of the US government, including the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, have also begun shifting away from Anthropic’s technology toward alternative AI providers such as OpenAI and Google.
The State Department has already moved its internal chatbot, StateChat, to OpenAI’s GPT-4.1. Government officials have characterized Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk,” a label historically reserved for foreign adversaries, after the company resisted demands to loosen its internal safeguards.
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Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, and other leadership did not endorse the uses of its AI products for mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons without human oversight.
They have maintained that such guardrails are essential to ethical AI deployment and have also signaled a willingness to litigate any punitive designations or contract cancellations.
Many argue that severing ties with a major domestic AI innovator, a silicon valley startup, will weaken national competitiveness and erode safeguards that have been foundational to responsible technology development.
Speculations also exist around the Pentagon’s use of Claude for simulations leading to the coordinated US-Israel attacks on Iran, early morning of Saturday; which have now turned into a full-blown war.
As the six-month phase-out period begins, federal agencies are now racing to transition systems reliant on Anthropic’s technology to other platforms.
