The day before the U.S. and Israel commenced airstrikes against Iran, President Donald Trump directed all federal agencies to immediately cease using artificial intelligence tools from Anthropic, with the president accusing the creator of the Claude platform of trying to “strong-arm” Department of Defense officials during negotiations.
Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), announced Monday that his agency, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are halting all use of the products.
“U.S. Federal Housing, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are terminating all use of Anthropic products, including the use of its Claude platform,” Pulte wrote on the social media platform X, using his favored term for the FHFA. The housing chief included a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social directive.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also posted on X, “The U.S. Department of Treasury is terminating all use of Anthropic products, including the use of its Claude platform, within our department.” His post concluded, “No private company will ever dictate the terms of our national security.”
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development told Scotsman Guide it doesn’t use Anthropic for any production software, nor is it using the company’s AI tools for internal, non-public facing software.
The administration’s shift follows discussions that the Department of Defense had been holding with Anthropic about the use of its products. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, issued a statement on Feb. 26 in support of the military, but he detailed an impasse in which his company refused to proceed with the deal unless it received assurance that its software would not be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.
The company stated that frontier AI systems “are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.”
On Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went on X “to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security.” He added: “America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.”
It is unclear how Anthropic’s AI tools were being used within the FHFA or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage investors under its regulatory oversight. Scotsman Guide has not received responses to its requests for further details.
