Secretary Hegseth And Chairman Caine Hold Pentagon Press Briefing On Iran Strikes

(Alex Wong/Getty Images)

A blow-by-blow catch-up on how Trump vs. Anthropic has unfolded

A consequential week punctuated by war highlights the deep rifts that exist between Silicon Valley and Washington.

3/2/26 12:50PM

Last week’s tense standoff between Anthropic and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth focused on the issue of how the startup’s AI could be hypothetically used to surveil Americans or kill people. By the weekend, that hypothetical scenario became very real.

Tensions started after a tense meeting at the Pentagon, which resulted in Hegseth giving Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei an ultimatum: he had until Friday at 5:01 p.m. ET to get on board with the Pentagon’s demands for full use of Claude for any legal purpose, or face the consequences. Here’s a quick timeline of how this fast-moving story unfolded:

Thursday 5:36 p.m. ET - Anthropic posted a statement from Amodei that the company will not acquiesce to Pentagon demands to allow the use of its Claude tool for any legal purpose.
Friday 3:47 p.m. ET - President Trump lashed out at the startup, calling it a “RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY,” and said he was directing all federal agencies to cease use of Anthropic’s software.
Friday 5:14 p.m. ET - In a post on X, Hegseth chided Anthropic’s refusal, and in an extraordinary move, said he would move to designate Anthropic “a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security,” effectively blacklisting the company’s tech from use by the US military or any contractors (like Palantir) working with the Pentagon on national security applications.
Friday 8:24 p.m. ET - In another blog post, Amodei defended Anthropic’s position and signaled that it may pursue legal action, calling the move “legally unsound.”
Friday 9:56 p.m. ET - OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that his company reached an agreement to deploy its models on the Pentagon’s classified network.
Saturday 1:15 a.m. ET - The American and Israeli attack on Iran commenced.
Saturday 8:21 p.m. ET - The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic’s Claude was used by the Pentagon to assess intelligence, identify targets, and simulate battle scenarios.
Sunday - Anthropic’s Claude app rose to the No. 1 spot on the iOS app store, dethroning ChatGPT.

The feud sent a chill through Silicon Valley, as companies wondered what control they would have going forward if the government decided it needed their tech.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5