A group of former defense and intelligence officials and policy experts sent a letter on Thursday to Congress calling for an investigation into the Pentagon’s decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk.
The bipartisan coalition of 30 people said in the letter, shared with CNBC, that the purpose of deeming an entity a supply chain risk is “to protect the United States from infiltration by foreign adversaries.” The group characterized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision last Friday against Anthropic as a “profound departure” that “sets a dangerous precedent.”
Hegseth announced the directive on X, after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic, whose Claude models and services have skyrocketed in popularity, largely in the enterprise world.
“Applying this tool to penalize a U.S. firm for declining to remove safeguards against mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons is a category error with consequences that extend far beyond this dispute,” the group said in the letter, addressed to the chairs and ranking members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees.
Signatories include retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Donald Arthur, former deputy assistant secretary of defense Diana Banks Thompson, former Andreessen Horowitz general partner John O’Farrell, Kat Duffy of the Council on Foreign Relations and Inflection AI CEO Sean White.
