Somewhat de-values real supply-chain risk alerts, when they're used for political ends.
Anthropic would have been less secure if they had give the access required to the US Government, so it's actually more secure today than if it had bent over.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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Using taxpayer dollars to fight culture wars over chatbots. What a timeline.
No need to dumb down killing brown people. They are using your tax dollars so a human doesn’t have To think about it.
Buh-bye Anthropic...
The DoD just killed Anthropic, because they won't be able to sell AI to any company that sells something to the DoD, or to companies that themselves sell something to the DoD. In other words, they won't be able to sell AI to anybody at all, because no company wants to become a supply chain risk to potential customers who might have a DoD supplier somewhere down the supply chain.
Remember: the DoD initially approached Anthropic. Anthropic ultimately decided to reject their offer, so DoD killed them out of spite.
That's what totalitatian regimes do.
Buh-bye Anthropic...
Nah. Short term dip in value, that's all, but I expect it to recover and improve.
When you realise the the US in not the only customer in the world, and other countries will be prioritising AI/LLMs that aren't embedded and ultimately controlled by the unstable and fascist government there. Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Canada - all places that have good reasons not to want the US Government being fed their data.
There's also Elon Musk's strange relationship with that government, and he would likely get access to Anthropic's codebase and IP through them too.
Also, non analytically, well done for standing up to bullies.
This absolutely did not kill them. I've been dealing with federal procurement, including ATOs for DoD, for years, and 99% of companies never even remotely interact with it. Yes, there's a large number that do, especially among Fortune 500s and up, but the actual percentage of companies who have military contracts is tiny. This was meant to intimidate them into compliance, but this doesn't make them any less viable than AIaaS already is or isn't.
no company wants to become a supply chain risk to potential customers who might have a DoD supplier somewhere down the supply chain
The order is actually much narrow than that; it only applies to companies who directly have contracts with the military.
Anthropic software just can't be used to process federal data, but if e.g. Lockheed uses ADP to process internal payroll, and ADP uses a third-party developer to build some software, and that developer uses Claude, that doesn't snake it's way back up the chain and invalidate Lockheed's contracts.
At the same time, they became a lot more palatable to the rest of the world and companies that want to avoid bad press / boycotts
The rest of the world is part of the global supply chain too. When it comes time to choose AI suppliers, companies will go "Uuh, maybe give Anthropic a skip just in case...", however palatable they may be.
Anthropic's tech would have to be overwhelmingly better than its competitors for AI customers to ignore the risk of losing potential business due to the supply chain poisoning effect of the DoD's classification, and they're not that much better.
That's the tragedy of the DoD's vile decision.
I’m not sure whether you realize how incredibly toxic the US is becoming right now… Anthropic made the right call, history-wise.
Not to mention the utter American arrogance of stating that because the US doesn't like something, the rest of us will blindly follow along.
Companies these days do what is right for their shareholders and if Claude makes money, or appears to make money, then the shareholders are happy.
Pretty much the entire industry is siding with Anthropic though.
Not to mention that many organizations have been making agreements with anthropic before this all happened. Sure DoD has money, but not nearly the large amount of private sector money.
The collapse of this bubble is going to be enormous though.