title: President Trump orders ALL Federal agencies in the US Government to immediately stop using Anthropic's technology.
author: u/ExternalMood4719
contenttype: redditpost
publication: r/LocalLLaMA
published: 2026-02-27T23:53:00+00:00
sourceurl: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rgn4ki/presidenttrumpordersallfederalagenciesin/
word_count: 979
https://preview.redd.it/m3lk2lo3k4mg1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=513cae2c197f8e4fe712baa4ae7420972e7f4047
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116144552969293195
Reports have been circulating that the U.S. Department of Defense issued an ultimatum to AI giant Anthropic to remove two "guardrails" by Friday. U.S. President Trump announced that every federal agency in the U.S. government must immediately stop using all of Anthropic's technology. For agencies like the War Department that use Anthropic products at all levels, there will be a six-month phase-out period. Anthropic had better cooperate, or the full power of the presidency will be used to force their compliance, including civil and criminal consequences.
Writing on the social platform Truth Social, he stated that Anthropic had made a catastrophic mistake by daring to coerce the War Department and forcing them to abide by its terms of service rather than the National Constitution. "Their selfishness is putting American lives at risk, placing our military in danger, and jeopardizing our national security." Trump noted, "It is we who will decide the fate of the nation, not some out-of-control radical-left AI company run by a group of people who know nothing about the real world."
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth immediately instructed the War Department to list Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" to national security, effective immediately. Any contractor, supplier, or partner doing business with the U.S. military is prohibited from engaging in any commercial activities with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide services to the War Department for no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to another better, more patriotic service.
Hegseth wrote on the X platform, stating that Anthropic’s attempt to seize veto power over the U.S. military’s operational decisions is unacceptable. "As Trump stated, only the Commander-in-Chief and the American people can decide the fate of our armed forces, not unelected tech executives." Anthropic's stance is fundamentally at odds with American principles, and its relationship with the U.S. Armed Forces and the federal government has been permanently altered.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees that he hopes the company can try to help de-escalate the tensions between Anthropic and the Department of Defense.
Altman stated, "AI should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons, and humans must remain involved in high-risk automated decision-making; these are our primary red lines."
OpenAI employees have already begun speaking out on social media in support of Anthropic. According to their website, approximately 70 current employees have signed an open letter titled "We Will Not Be Divided," aimed at "building consensus and solidarity in the face of pressure from the Department of Defense."
Altman said, "Despite my many disagreements with Anthropic, I fundamentally trust them as a company. I believe they truly care about safety, and I am also glad they have consistently supported our warriors. I am not sure how things will unfold from here."
Update: https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-war
I know this company doesn't develop open-source models, but it's still quite interesting.
Score: 579 | Comments: 270 | Subreddit: r/LocalLLaMA
Top Comments
u/Prestigious_Thing797 (250 pts):
Autonomous weapons that can kill without human approval, and mass domestic surveillance are the only two things Anthropic doesn't allow, for those out of the loop. That is what has sparked all of this.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
https://preview.redd.it/umw5homsq4mg1.png?width=1310&format=png&auto=webp&s=8167ab53dea2a32ed1c2e388d2b5feb36498c0da
u/Toooooool (62 pts):
Altman stated, "AI should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons, and humans must remain involved in high-risk automated decision-making; these are our primary red lines."
Unless of course it's his company doing it, in which I'm sure he'd be happy to "figure out a solution" so that maybe OpenAI doesn't go bankrupt by this time next year.
u/TastesLikeOwlbear (253 pts):
Hegseth wrote on the X platform, stating that Anthropic’s attempt to seize veto power over the U.S. military’s operational decisions is unacceptable.
The same operational decisions they're so desperate to turn over to AI...
u/rm-rf-rm (208 pts):
This post is reported for being off-topic - I have approved it.
This is not local model news but it is a development in the ecosystem that has and will have broad repercussions. As such, it is worthy of conversation in this sub.
u/gamblingapocalypse (19 pts):
At the EOD on a Friday no less!!
u/NNN_Throwaway2 (92 pts):
Does Trump even write his own "truths" or does he get Stephen Miller to do it for him? Reads like something he would say.
u/triynizzles1 (14 pts):
I am a little confused what are the guard rails The US wants removed from anthropic?
u/StewedAngelSkins (78 pts):
i wonder if kegsbreath actually had a use in mind for "autonomous lethal weapons" or if it's just the principle of the matter. anthropic's line isn't even "LLMs shouldn't ever do this", rather it's "LLM's aren't reliable enough to do this" which is obviously true regardless of what motivations you ascribe to it.
inb4 he convinces musk to let him hook grok up to a weapon system instead and it immediately fucking slaughters a couple dozen american "warriors" because one of them let his beard get a bit too long.
u/Imakerocketengine (57 pts):
Time for Anthropic to aura farm, in the word of ClementDelangue
The Department of War just learned the golden rule of AI: Not your weights, not your brain
u/Fault23 (70 pts):
https://preview.redd.it/3po9ig8pw4mg1.png?width=242&format=png&auto=webp&s=5856f6e3c9e53d352f11b31cc6717a3064092a21
u/ortegaalfredo (40 pts):
I can't believe it was Maduro in pajamas who ultimately stopped the rise of Skynet
u/DistanceSolar1449 (23 pts):
“In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.”
So suppliers like Nvidia and Google can’t do commercial activity with Anthropic anymore?
This is a death sentence. Anthropic runs inference on Nvidia GPUs and Google TPUs.
u/triynizzles1 (26 pts):
It would be ironic if military turned to open source and started using Qwen or deepseek. 😂
u/Queasy_Asparagus69 (16 pts):
Yeah! More compute for us
u/Ok_Warning2146 (7 pts):
I think Trump will TACO after industry leaders talk to him. He underestimates how intertwined Anthropics is with the tech industry.
u/AngleFun1664 (20 pts):
What a fucking baby
u/Far-Low-4705 (9 pts):
I don’t like how we are using LLMs in defense departments and I really hope they aren’t actually deployed for anything other than chat or coding assistants…
u/Repulsive-Mall-2665 (12 pts):
Any US company powerful enough works with the NSA and CIA for mass surveillance and manipulating opinions. Not to mention torture and murder.
That's why you use models from other countries or local ones if you're rich enough.
u/One-Employment3759 (12 pts):
I'm sure Greg Brockman must be really loving that he ended up donated $25 million to Trump just so they could use AI for war. Well done chump lord.
u/aallsbury (7 pts):
Anthropic (and OpenAi) were already going to fall to Google/Gemini over the next 6mos-year...while this is an interesting socio-political exercise to watch live, lol, nothing IMO really has changed except Google will probably gain dominance even faster.
The deck is stacked for Google. Hate me if you want, but I almost guarantee this outcome.
u/Revolutionalredstone (5 pts):
Im just glad the smart people who created the technology can't be trusted to draw up basic safety outlines.
I'm glad some alcoholic redneck with a military hardon will do the lords work and just hook it straight to guns pointed at Americans with no oversight.
God Bless America
u/az226 (5 pts):
They were so instrumental the government tried to force their hand, yet they’re so bad they must be stopped from being used. The contradiction is over 9000.
u/abeautifulrhind (12 pts):
He lost me on this. I don't want mass spying and both parties are into it for different reasons. Whatever I think about anthropic, they are right on this. If I wanted to live in china, I would have moved there, at least there's more smoking and the hardware is cheaper.
Have fun with half-baked GPT and lol grok, g-men.
u/Thyste (12 pts):
More reason to use anthropic then. I've been slowly finding that Claude is the most reasonably sound of all the commercially available LLMs to use. I respect the decision that they are making here and that's what I would like to support. But the main reason is that of all the models I actively use (ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and I don't use the meta models except locally), it seems to be the most analytical and least prone to hallucinations, Claude and Sonnet have been providing better answers and solutions that I don't have to fix and as much revise later.
u/Herr_Drosselmeyer (9 pts):
https://preview.redd.it/1ind4gxw85mg1.png?width=1216&format=png&auto=webp&s=251a7a1665aa046adb23f63b207e4f792bb83590
Let's ignore the politics here, Anthropic is pretty much the only AI company that has never released an open source model. Even the notoriously 'closed' OpenAI have given us at least some models, as limited as they were.
I believe that AI needs to be as open source as possible, while maintaining an acceptable edge for proprietary models. Anthropic doesn't even try to clear that bar. So yeah, screw them.