In a stunning showdown last week between the Trump administration and frontier AI company Anthropic, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth demanded that Anthropic allow its AI models to be used for “any lawful purpose,” without any restrictions.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused and laid out the company’s two red lines for its models’ usage by the US government: barring the employment of fully autonomous lethal weapons without human intervention or oversight, and prohibiting the utilization of its AI for domestic surveillance at scale. 

Hegseth then said he would designate Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to national security,” which effectively turns Anthropic into an economic pariah, banning any federal contractor or subcontractor from doing business with the company. Trump, for his part, posted to Truth Social to order a phase-out of all Anthropic technology over a six-month period, threatening “major civil and criminal consequences” if Anthropic did not cooperate with the transition. 

It is worth noting that designating an American company as a supply chain risk to national security is unprecedented. It’s the kind of thing normally reserved for US adversaries and not domestic frontier AI companies that have deployed their models in classified American networks. Anthropic, for its part, has stated it will challenge the supply-chain risk designation in court. 

The interesting aspect to all this is that the underpinning of the Trump administration’s argument — that it should ultimately be up to the US government to decide how it uses technology, not the private companies supplying the technology — is one that makes sense and is consistent with the US........

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