The standoff between the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic and the U.S. government escalated sharply today.

President Trump lashed out at the company's leadership and directed all federal agencies to stop using Anthropics products.

And the Pentagon designated the company a supply chain risk to national security.

William Brangham joins us now with more, William.

That's right, Jeff.

Anthropic had long said that it didn't want the U.S. military using one of its programs

for any fully autonomous weapons systems or for any mass surveillance of American citizens.

Negotiations were ongoing this week, but the

President's order seems to have brought them to an end. The Pentagon's designation would bar

any company that does business with the Department of War from doing any commercial business

with Anthropic. For more on what this could mean, we are joined by the University of Pennsylvania's Michael Horowitz.

He previously worked in the Defense Department where he wrote the Pentagon's policy on artificial intelligence weapons systems.

Michael Horowitz, so good to have you here. I wonder if you could just give me your first, your reaction to this, to the president saying,

we are wiping Anthropic completely out of the federal

government and that any Pentagon contractor that also has dealings with Anthropic has to stop those as well.

What a day. I think that my initial thought, frankly, is that that escalated quickly in that what

seemed like a needless dispute between Anthropic in the Pentagon has hit crisis proportions. I say

needless dispute because Anthropic was the first of the frontier AI labs willing to work with the defense, willing to work with the Pentagon in a classified environment. And all of the projects the Pentagon has asked Anthropic to work on, Anthropic was happy to work on. This was a theoretical dispute about future possibilities that between Anthropic and the Pentagon,

that is now really escalated, the president's order in combination with the order from

Secretary Hexeth could not just be devastating to the Pentagon's ability to use Anthropics

technology, but could be devastating to Anthropics' core business,

depending on how it's interpreted by the markets, and whether Anthropic is able to get,

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