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The US State Department replaced Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 with OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 as the underlying model for its internal chatbot, StateChat, after a Feb. 27 presidential directive ordering federal agencies to remove Anthropic tools. Internal documentation cited by Nextgov/FCW indicates Claude models were removed from the department’s enterprise generative AI platform and that users of Claude-based custom GPT configurations were instructed to transition to non-Anthropic, government-approved models; the change also reset StateChat’s available knowledge base to older data (reported as reverting to May 2024 from a more recent June 2025 corpus used previously).
Anthropic responded by filing lawsuits challenging the government’s actions, with reporting indicating the dispute is tied to a supply chain risk designation and broader claims about the company’s policy positions. Ars Technica reported that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has publicly opposed certain government uses of AI—particularly mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous lethal weapons—while stating support for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions; the outlet also noted a supporting brief from technical staff at Google (an Anthropic investor) and OpenAI, arguing the designation could chill industry debate and harm US innovation competitiveness. Separately, Reuters and Nextgov/FCW reporting described similar directives across multiple agencies to switch from Claude to ChatGPT following the governmentwide move away from Anthropic technology.
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A federal appeals court in Washington allowed the Pentagon to proceed with removing Anthropic technology from military systems. The ruling left Anthropic cut off from Pentagon work for the time being while the broader dispute over the government's blacklist continued.
After the governmentwide ban and supply-chain-risk designation, Anthropic filed two lawsuits against the U.S. government. One challenged the designation itself, and another alleged retaliation and sought an injunction against the government's actions.
The State Department changed the underlying model for its internal StateChat chatbot from Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 to OpenAI's GPT-4.1. An internal document said Anthropic no longer powered StateChat, and the chatbot's available data was rolled back to May 2024 from the more recent data reportedly available under the Claude-backed version.
Following the directive, State Department employees using a Claude-based customGPT configuration were told to migrate to a different government-approved, non-Anthropic model. The deadline for the move was set for 2026-03-06.
On 2026-02-27, President Donald Trump issued a directive ordering the removal of Anthropic tools from U.S. government systems. The action triggered agency efforts to replace Claude-based services and was tied to a governmentwide designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk.
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Anthropic alleged that three China-based AI labs—**DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax**—used roughly **24,000 fraudulent accounts** to generate more than **16 million interactions** with Claude in a coordinated effort to extract the model’s advanced reasoning, coding, and tool-use capabilities. The company said it linked the activity through IP correlations, request metadata, and infrastructure indicators, and warned that large-scale unauthorized distillation could remove safety guardrails and enable copied capabilities to be used in offensive cyber operations, disinformation, intelligence collection, and mass surveillance. Anthropic said it shared its findings with U.S. government entities and industry partners, while noting it had no evidence that the Chinese government directly coordinated the campaigns. The allegations surfaced as Anthropic remains in a separate high-stakes dispute with the U.S. Department of Defense, which on June 4 refused to reverse the company’s designation as a supply-chain risk. Anthropic is challenging the Pentagon’s March blacklisting after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invoked emergency powers following failed talks over limits on Claude’s use for domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. Federal attorneys told the court the procedural dispute over administrative remedies is now moot because the secretary has denied reconsideration, and reporting indicates a majority of the appellate panel appeared inclined to let the designation stand while the case proceeds.
Jun 29, 2026
OpenAI said it reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense to deploy its large language models onto **military classified networks**, with CEO **Sam Altman** stating the deal includes policy and technical constraints such as *prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance* and maintaining *human responsibility for the use of force*, including around autonomous weapon systems. The announcement was made shortly after President **Donald Trump** directed federal agencies to stop using AI from rival **Anthropic**, after Defense Secretary **Pete Hegseth** designated Anthropic a **“supply chain risk,”** effectively blacklisting it from Pentagon business. Separate reporting described an alleged month-long intrusion campaign against multiple Mexican government entities that purportedly used **Anthropic’s Claude** to identify vulnerabilities and generate exploit code, with claims of **150 GB** of data theft and exposure of large volumes of taxpayer and civil registry records; several Mexican agencies publicly disputed the breach claims. Additional consumer-focused coverage noted Anthropic’s retired *Opus 3* model being used to publish a Substack blog, which is not directly tied to the U.S. defense deployment decision or the Mexico intrusion allegations.
Jun 29, 2026
Anthropic drew heightened scrutiny from security and policy communities over how its **AI safety and governance commitments** are evolving and how its models are being positioned for sensitive use cases. A Help Net Security analysis reported that Anthropic’s updated *Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) 3.0* represents a structural shift from maintaining absolute risk below fixed thresholds to a more **relative, competitor-dependent** posture—implying Anthropic may be less willing to pause or constrain capability development if peers do not. The same reporting also noted Anthropic’s launch of *Claude Code Security* as a move that unsettled parts of the cybersecurity market and raised questions about trust and vendor assurances in security-adjacent AI offerings. In parallel, Lawfare reported the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a **national security risk** tied to usage restrictions Anthropic imposed on a military contract, while also describing reporting that the U.S. military used Anthropic’s *Claude* model in initiating operations in Iran less than a day later—highlighting the tension between policy concerns and rapid military adoption of frontier AI. Separately, Anthropic announced the creation of the **Anthropic Institute**, a research unit intended to study long-term societal impacts and risks from advanced AI; the company stated its models can already discover severe cybersecurity vulnerabilities and argued that governments and industry will face near-term governance challenges as capabilities accelerate.
Jun 29, 2026