INSIDE COMPLIANCE

Governments around the world have increasingly turned to artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for defense and national security. In the United States, that shift has come with its share of conflict. In early 2026, a dispute between the federal government and AI company Anthropic came to a head after the Trump administration moved to bar the Pentagon from using Anthropic’s Claude software. At its core, the standoff exposed a tension that is only going to grow more common: tech companies that want to set limits on how their products are used, versus a government that sees those limits as a threat to its own capabilities. The Department of Defense had previously brought Claude into certain internal tools and workflows. But Anthropic’s restrictions on military use created friction with agencies that wanted broader access to the software. When those disagreements proved unresolvable, the administration granted agencies six months to stop using Anthropic products entirely, turning what had been a contract dispute into one of the more public clashes between Washington and a tech company in recent memory.