By Default
Publication Date: 2026-03-10 12:00:00
On February 27, the Pentagon designated Anthropic, the first frontier artificial intelligence (AI) company on U.S. government-classified networks, as a supply chain risk to national security, even as the military reportedly continued to use Claude in operations in Iran. President Trump then ordered all federal agencies to immediately stop using Anthropic technology, effectively leading to a government-wide ban. At the same time, OpenAI settled with the Pentagon and then publicly announced changes to key terms on social media after backlash.
Although the public debate has framed this as a dispute over whether the Pentagon or Silicon Valley controls military AI, the deeper problem is structural: a procurement framework that raises questions it was never intended to answer, and a political stance that dismantles the governance infrastructure that could have answered those questions. Although the problem is not new, Anthropic-Pentagon-OpenAI…
