Pentagon

Sam Altman admits OpenAI looked “opportunistic and sloppy.” Those are his words, not his critics'. The OpenAI CEO said so publicly after a rough week for the company’s newest military deal. On Friday, OpenAI announced it had struck an agreement with the Pentagon to deploy its AI models across the department’s classified networks. The timing raised eyebrows: the announcement came just hours after Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using technology from OpenAI’s rival, Anthropic, a company holding a $200 million Pentagon contract. ...

The Pentagon says it finally did it. A Defense Department official told the BBC on Monday that the military has “ceased the use of Anthropic products.” That ends, on paper at least, the department’s long and awkward entanglement with Claude. The statement arrived more than six weeks after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s own deadline. Hegseth set a six-month phase-out clock on Feb. 27, putting the cutoff in late August. Instead, sources told the BBC that Claude was still being used by Pentagon staff as recently as last week, including in military operations against Iran. ...

A federal appeals court just told Anthropic that its own safety features are the reason it can’t sell AI to the Pentagon. In a 2-1 decision handed down Friday, Sept 25, the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC upheld the Defense Department’s blacklisting of the AI startup, siding with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a fight that has now cost Anthropic billions of dollars in lost contracts and scrambled one of the most important commercial relationships in military AI. ...