White House Moves to End Federal Use of Anthropic’s Claude AI

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Friday (Feb. 27) that President Donald Trump said the federal government will no longer work with Anthropic and that agencies using Anthropic’s Claude models will get a six-month phaseout period.

The WSJ said the decision comes just ahead of a Pentagon deadline for Anthropic to agree that the military can use its models in “all lawful use cases,” a concession the company refused. Anthropic, according to the WSJ, wanted contract language that would prohibit use of its models for autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. Defense officials took the position that the military should retain final authority on use cases, as long as they are lawful.

“I am directing every federal agency in the United States government to immediately cease all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it and will not do business with them again!” the president said in a Friday (Feb. 27) post on Truth Social, according to the WSJ.

The WSJ also reported that the Pentagon had threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act to force compliance and to label Anthropic a supply-chain risk, which could limit its ability to work with other government contractors. It described how embedded Claude had become in government workflows, from summarizing documents to analyzing data, and said pausing those functions to move to alternatives could slow modernization efforts.

The WSJ also detailed a flashpoint involving Claude’s use in a Venezuela raid and a follow-up question raised by an Anthropic employee to partner Palantir, which Defense officials viewed as an attempt to exert control over military operations.

On recent PYMNTS coverage of Anthropic, we have followed the company’s push into enterprise use cases and its safety positioning, including updates to its safety framework and new Claude releases aimed at business workflows. We have also covered its work with large platform partners that want to build “agent” experiences for small businesses and consumers.