The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has flagged new national security risks tied to Anthropic’s hiring of foreign personnel, including workers from China.
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Anthropic employs “a large number of foreign nationals to build and support its LLM products, including many from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which increases the degree of adversarial risk should those employees comply with the PRC’s National Intelligence Law,” the court filing stated.
While other major U.S. artificial intelligence labs working with the DoD may have similar risks, their strong security practices and history of responsible, trustworthy behavior help reduce those risks. “Anthropic’s case, however, is different,” Pentagon undersecretary Emil Michael wrote in the declaration.
“Anthropic’s leadership demonstrated an intent to prevent the U.S. military’s lawful use of their LLM product, Claude, despite the company’s publicly stated knowledge that adversarial nation states have a practice of stealing Anthropic’s LLM technology for their own unrestricted use,” the document stated.
The DoD also argues that Anthropic’s leadership “insisted on imposing restrictions on DoW’s [Department of War] lawful military capability development, operations and intelligence missions, even though it would impair the capabilities of the U.S. military relative to our adversaries.”
“Determinations about lawful military uses, however, must rest solely with the DoW and not with a private company,” Michael’s declaration noted.
The DoD further alleges that Anthropic’s leadership acted in “bad faith” by leaking unclassified information from private discussions with the DoD to the media.
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The declaration went on to state that if Anthropic were to interfere during a military operation, either by shutting off access to the AI model or altering its functionality, that interference could cause “serious harm to national security and loss of human life.”
“Anthropic leadership’s adversarial behavior has elevated the supply chain risks to a saturation point,” the declaration continued.
The filing noted the Pentagon will discontinue all use of Anthropic’s defense products within 180 days, the filing stated.
The Pentagon continues to argue its case that Anthropic poses a national security supply chain risk. The artificial intelligence company filed a lawsuit against the DoD earlier this month, escalating its ongoing clash with the Trump administration.
Last week, more than 30 employees from Google, OpenAI and Google DeepMind filed an amicus brief supporting Anthropic’s lawsuit against the DoD.
The next hearing on the matter will be held on March 24.
Anthropic and the Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
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