US Treasury, federal housing agency ending use of Anthropic products

March 2 (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury Department and the federal housing agency are terminating all use of Anthropic products, including its Claude platform, in response to President Donald Trump‘s order to stop using the AI startup’s technology.

Trump on Friday directed the government to stop work with Anthropic, and the Pentagon said it would declare the startup a supply-chain risk, dealing a major blow to the artificial intelligence lab after a showdown about technology guardrails.

The Treasury Department is terminating all use of Anthropic products, including Claude, Secretary Scott Bessent said in a post on X on Monday.

William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, also said in a post on X that his department and U.S. mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are terminating all use of Anthropic products.

Trump said that there would be a six-month phase-out for the Defense Department and other agencies that use Anthropic’s products.

These actions mark an extraordinary rebuke by the United States against one of the premier companies that have kept it in the lead on national-security-critical AI, threatening to give Anthropic a pariah status that Washington until now had reserved for enemy suppliers.

Late on Friday, rival OpenAI announced its own deal to deploy technology in the Defense Department’s classified network.

(Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones and Juby Babu; editing by David Ljunggren, Michelle Nichols and Alan Barona)