Pentagon official Emil Michael labels Anthropic a persistent supply chain risk

Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael stated on Friday that Anthropic remains a significant supply chain risk to the United States.

Speaking on CNBC’s "Squawk Box," Michael clarified that while the firm is blacklisted, its new artificial intelligence model, Mythos, represents a "separate national security moment."

He explained that "I think the Mythos issue that’s being dealt with government-wide, not just at the Department of War, is a separate national security moment where we have to make sure that our networks are hardened up, because that model has capabilities that are particular to finding cyber vulnerabilities and patching them."

The Department of Defence recently designated Anthropic as a threat after failing to reach an agreement on how its models would be utilised.

Consequently, all defence contractors must now certify they do not employ Anthropic’s Claude models in military-related projects.

Michael noted that the government still demands guardrails, which "are negotiable based on what they are with all the companies, and they have different views on that."

Amidst this exclusion, the Pentagon has formalised agreements with seven other firms, including Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX, to deploy technology across classified networks for "lawful operational use."

This latest clash follows a March lawsuit filed by Anthropic against the Trump administration in an attempt to reverse its blacklisting.

The tensions first spilt into public view earlier this year when the two entities reached an impasse over operational transparency.

Looking ahead, the government continues to evaluate the integration of open-weight models from startups like Reflection while maintaining a firm stance on current supply chain restrictions.