The Anthropic statement
At 2026-02-26 21:55 UTC, Anthropic releases a public statement in which they speak out regarding the demands of the US Department Of War.
In said statement, they explicitly address two concrete use cases in which they deny to provide their technology:
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Mass domestic surveillance. They don’t want their products being using to patrol USA citizens and acknowledge that their services could be used to easily arbitrarily profile any citizens data without the need of a warrant.
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Fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic acknowledges the utility of partial and fully autonomous weapons in the military, but they affirm that the guardrails present in their technology are not enough to assure the safety of american warfighters and civilians.
The open letter
The same day, the “We Will Not Be Divided” open letter is made public. In it, hundreds of both Google and OpenAI employees, direct anthropic competitors in the AI market, declare their support to Anthropic.
Response from the US government
On the next day, 27, the White House twitter account and Donald Trump (POTUS) make a post directing all USA federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s product in a six month period and threaten Anthropic with “major civil and criminal consequences” if they are not supportive during the transition period.
The same day, at 22:14 UTC, Pete Hegseth (US Secretary of War) makes a post calling out Anthropic for trying to “veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military” and plans to designate Anthropic as a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security.