The company's Claude chatbot is one of the few AI systems cleared for use in classified settings. But a standoff between Anthropic and the Trump administration is putting its government work at risk.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang weighed in on a conflict between the Defense Department and its strategic partner on Thursday, saying it's “not the end of the world.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a Friday deadline to comply with demands to peel back safeguards on its AI model or risk losing a Pentagon contract.

Anthropic said it will no longer "pause the scaling and/or delay the deployment of new models" when the updates would outpace its own safety measures.

Anthropic launched Claude Cowork in a research capacity last month, rattling software stocks as investors grappled with AI's disruptive potential. The company said Claude Cowork's new updates mark its transition into a true enterprise-grade product.

Anthropic, a company founded by OpenAI exiles worried about the dangers of AI, is loosening its core safety principle in response to competition.

The Pentagon was already reportedly unhappy with Anthropic’s insistence on its red lines, and the company has not been included so far on the GenAI.mil platform the department built out in late 2025. At a speech in January, Hegseth pointedly said that “we will not employ AI models that won’t allow you to fight wars.”

Debates have long swirled around AI and its use in weapons targeting, the idea of no human involvement still an uncomfortable one.