By Ed Pilkington
Publication Date: 2026-03-01 17:00:00
The US military reportedly used Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, to inform its attack on Iran, despite Donald Trump announcing just hours earlier that he was cutting all ties with the company and its artificial intelligence tools.
The Wall Street Journal and Axios reported on Claude’s deployment during the massive joint U.S.-Israeli bombing of Iran that began Saturday. It underscores the complexity of the U.S. military withdrawing powerful AI tools from its missions when the technology is already tightly integrated into operations.
According to the Journal, the U.S. military command used the tools for reconnaissance purposes, as well as to assist in selecting targets and conducting battlefield simulations.
On Friday, just hours before the Iran attack began, Trump ordered all federal agencies to immediately stop using Claude. He denounced Anthropic on Truth Social as a “radical left-wing AI company run by people who have no idea what the real world is about.”
The burning dispute was triggered by the deployment…
