The US military reportedly used Anthropic’s AI model, Cloud, to inform its attack on Iran despite Donald Trump’s decision to sever all ties with the company and its artificial intelligence tools, announced hours earlier.
The use of the cloud was reported during the massive US-Israeli bombing of Iran that began on Saturday wall street journal And Axios. This underscores the complexity of the U.S. military withdrawing powerful AI tools from its missions when the technology is already intricately embedded in operations.
According to the Journal, the US military command used the devices for intelligence purposes, as well as to help select targets and carry out battlefield simulations.
On Friday, hours before the Iran attack began, Trump ordered all federal agencies to immediately stop using the cloud. He condemned the anthropic true social A “radical leftist AI company run by people who have no idea what the real world is”.
The use of the cloud in a raid by the US military to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January sparked fiery controversy. Anthropic objected, pointing to its terms of use, which do not allow the cloud to be applied for violent purposes, develop weapons, or conduct surveillance.
Since then, relations between Trump, the Pentagon and the AI ​​company continued to deteriorate. In a lengthy post on X on Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused Anthropic of “arrogance and betrayal”, and said that “America’s war fighters will never again be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech”.
Hegseth demanded full and unrestricted access to all of Anthropic’s AI models for every lawful purpose.
But the defense secretary also acknowledged the difficulty of increasingly separating military systems from AI tools, given how widely used they have become. He said Anthropic “will continue to provide services for a period of no more than six months to allow a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service”.
Since breaking ties with Anthropic, rival company OpenAI has moved towards infringement. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said it has reached an agreement with the Pentagon for the use of the company’s tools in classified networks, including ChatGPT.
