The Pentagon formally notified Anthropic PBC last week that its products have been deemed a supply-chain risk, marking the first time Washington has publicly placed that label on an American company.
But if it sounds like a death knell, it isn't. Such attacks are usually reserved for Chinese tech, meaning there's now a pattern for how these things play out: Usually with a lot of noise and remarkably little lasting damage.
Let's start with TikTok. Washington spent more than half a decade targeting the platform under the banner of national-security risks. The short-form video app initially faced the threat of a ban during President Donald Trump's first term due to its Chinese origins. Pundits spent years declaring the end. But Trump then reversed course and campaigned to save it when he was reelected to the White House. The app's scale and cultural reach made the crusade to ban it politically untenable, and Trump even sidelined Congress multiple times to buy breathing room to strike a deal. After all that, TikTok's US operations emerged unscathed -- as did the ambitions of its parent company ByteDance Ltd.
Anthropic, meanwhile, has said it will challenge the designation in court and that the vast majority of its customers are unaffected by it. While such a warning can chill federal contracts and spook risk-averse partners, the company has said the official letter ultimately has a "narrow scope." Still, a snag for the Pentagon is that Anthropic isn't a villain the public wants.
The clash traces back to the AI firm stating that it would refuse to compromise on its safety principles, specifically that it won't allow its technology to be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance. That's exactly what makes people recoil from AI in the first place. If anything, Anthropic's stance burnished Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei's image (even if this should be the bare minimum from leaders building what they call the most consequential technology of our time). Instead of isolating Anthropic, Washington helped it look like the rare tech firm willing to say "no."
The reputational upside is already measurable. As my colleague Dave Lee has written, Anthropic's Claude app downloads have surged since its disagreement with the Pentagon became public, while rival ChatGPT's have ticked down.
The politics are shifting in Anthropic's favor. When half of Americans are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI -- and only 10% feel the opposite -- picking a fight with the safety-minded company is an odd hill to die on. And it's not just the public rallying behind Anthropic, but large swaths of the tech industry as well.
TikTok isn't alone in emerging stronger from US government attacks. For roughly a decade, Washington has targeted Huawei Technologies Co., first as a supply-chain risk and then with increasingly more restrictions. Yet research published late last year from the Washington-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation think tank argues that Huawei "is a more innovative company today" than when the US started trying to choke it. The lesson, they argued, is that US techno-economic leverage is "weaker than most think."
Anthropic isn't Huawei or TikTok. The firm is American and has worked with the US government. But that's precisely the point. There's a reason the Defense Department chose it in the first place -- it offered up some of the best technology on the market. Trump's team may have used TikTok to reach younger voters despite attacking it, but the stakes for AI are higher. Don't be surprised when US officials recognize that they needs Anthropic, too.
At the same time, everyone from lawmakers to national security hawks have already warned that the US can't compete with China in AI while kneecapping American innovation. Calling a homegrown champion a risk may satisfy a bureaucratic impulse to appear tough, but it doesn't build AI capacity.
Washington can spend years sounding national security alarms, only to quietly back away once public opinion, political incentives and practical dependence on the technology collide.
If TikTok, and even Huawei, can emerge stronger after sustained US pressure, the likeliest lesson here is that Washington will eventually decide it can't afford to sideline one of its best AI firms, and find a face-saving way to move on.