Shortly after Trump's announcement, and 13 minutes after the Pentagon's deadline, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the company a "supply chain and national security risk." This designation means that no contractor or supplier working with the military can do business with Anthropic. Later on Friday, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, announced that it had reached an agreement with the Department of Defense to provide its AI technology for classified systems.

In a statement, Anthropic asserted, “We maintained our exceptions for two reasons. First, we do not believe that current cutting-edge AI models are reliable enough to be used in fully autonomous weapons. Allowing current models to be used in this way would endanger American combatants and civilians. Second, we believe that mass surveillance of Americans at home constitutes a violation of fundamental rights.”