After a high-profile standoff with the Pentagon, AI giant Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei are facing the full weight of President Donald Trump’s wrath. “The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social last week.

Anthropic drew the ire of the federal government last week after the company refused to allow the Department of War unfettered access to its AI model Claude, particularly in what Anthropic describes as mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

Taking the moral high ground could come at a hefty price: In response, Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth deemed the company a “supply chain risk,” banning any contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the US military to use Anthropic. In the face of that threat, Amodei didn’t budge. “We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Amodei wrote in a blog post explaining the decision. The next day, Trump directed every federal agency to immediately cease use of Anthropic’s technology.

“In this instance, Anthropic has been willing to blow up an important relationship with the government by sticking to their guns,” said Paul Scharre, a former official at the Department of Defense, where he worked on policies related to autonomous weapons. “They’ve been willing to stick to their principles even when there's a cost to doing so. And I think that is notable. Not all companies necessarily do that.”

The media frenzy around Anthropic’s stance has brought it some goodwill from Trump critics. Over the weekend, Claude shot to the top of Apple’s App Store charts, surpassing ChatGPT for the first time (though the app's popularity had also been rising since the Super Bowl and after well-reviewed model updates). The pop star Katy Perry posted a screenshot on X of a Claude Pro signup page with a heart around it. Outside of Anthropic’s office in San Francisco, fans scrawled uplifting messages in chalk on the sidewalk, including, “YOU DO NOT STAND ALONE,” and “GOD LOVES ANTHROPIC.” Though the company has been working to scale its systems to accommodate its recent popularity surge, a service outage to Claude on Monday was instead due to a technical issue, and not an influx of users, a spokesperson said.

Anthropic declined to comment on Amodei’s stance and the political consequences to arise from it. But those who have been following the evolution of this five-year-old company won’t be surprised by its stance.

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