Hours after Trump announced ban on Claude AI, US military used it in Iran strikes — reports

The US reportedly relied on the artificial intelligence tool Claude to support its strikes on Iran, shortly after US President Donald Trump announced that the military would no longer use the tool.

The reports from The Wall Street Journal and Axios, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, came amid the joint US-Israeli military campaign against the Iranian regime. On the first day of the operation on Saturday, the strikes hit a range of Iranian targets and killed the country’s longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

According to the reports, US forces used Claude, made by the AI company Anthropic, to assist the strikes that day. The Journal reported that the military uses the tool to assess intelligence, identify targets and simulate battle scenarios.

The Journal report said the AI model is “embedded” in the US military’s operations, and according to reports, Claude was previously used during the US’s seizure of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in January.

But on Friday, the day before the US and Israel began their strikes, Trump wrote a social media post ordering “every federal agency in the United States government to immediately cease all use of Anthropic’s technology.”

Anthropic and the White House have been at odds since the company refused to remove safeguards on Claude to allow unrestricted use by the Pentagon for national security. According to reports, Anthropic was concerned about the US using its tools to surveil US citizens or enable autonomous weapons.

On Friday, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered his department to “designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security,” he wrote in a post on X.

“Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,” he added.

In a statement Saturday, Anthropic said that it had made it “clear that we support all lawful uses of AI for national security.”

Anthropic’s contract with the US Defense Department is worth up to $200 million, according to The Journal. Hegseth and Trump both said the Defense Department would continue to work with Anthropic for a maximum of six months while it phases its services out. That work appears to include support for the operation in Iran.

Shortly after the Friday announcement, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, stated that his company had reached an agreement with the Defense Department.

“We think our agreement has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic’s,” OpenAI said in a statement.

When contacted by the Journal, US Central Command declined to comment on specific systems being used against Iran.