The battle between the Trump administration and Anthropic AI has been raging for months, and its mercurial nature has made it one of the harder spats of this term to keep track of, even for those of us in the tech news world. But after last Friday’s surprise de facto ban of the company’s latest model releases, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, many are wondering if the government’s meddling goes beyond the realm of hypervigilance into more malevolent territory. In fact, according to recent reporting in The New York Times, some Anthropic employees are outright convinced that this administration is actively trying to harm their business. The Dario Amodei-led company was initially brought into Trump’s orbit late last year with a DoD contract offer as part of the Department of War’s rollout of an “AI-first” military strategy. The apparent beginning of things going off the rails came when Anthropic asked for a modicum of regulation and some guarantees about how its tech would be implemented—mass domestic surveillance and autonomous killings were off the table. The negotiating hurdles presented by these crumbs of ethics were clearly a break from the more laissez-faire deals made by their industry peers and rankled Pete Hegseth. Soon after, in an unprecedented and seemingly punitive measure, the Pentagon deemed Anthropic a “supply-chain risk.” This designation barred any “contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military” from doing business with Anthropic, according to Hegseth’s subsequent post on X. Despite this alleged security risk, Hegseth also made clear that Anthropic would still need to spend the remaining months of its contract providing service to the Pentagon until a “better and more patriotic” replacement was found.