Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to label Anthropic a “Supply-Chain Risk to National Security” on Friday resulted in more questions than answers.
“It’s all very puzzling,” Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, told CNBC in an interview.
Anthropic is the only American company ever to be publicly named a supply chain risk, as the designation has traditionally been used against foreign adversaries. But the company hasn’t received any official declaration beyond social media posts.
A formal designation will require defense vendors and contractors to certify that they don’t use Anthropic’s models in their work with the Pentagon.
The dispute centered around how Anthropic’s artificial intelligence models could be used by the military. The Department of Defense wanted Anthropic to grant the agency unfettered access to its Claude models across all lawful purposes, while Anthropic wanted assurance that its technology would not be tapped for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance.
