GoKawiilSenator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, during a Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said the Department of Defense's decision to designate artificial intelligence startup Anthropic a supply chain risk "appears to be retaliation."
In a formal letter to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday, Warren noted that the department "could have chosen to terminate its contract with Anthropic or continued using its technology in unclassified systems."
"I am particularly concerned that the DoD is trying to strong-arm American companies into providing the Department with the tools to spy on American citizens and deploy fully autonomous weapons without adequate safeguards," Warren wrote.
U.S. senators are seeking more answers from the Defense Department's contracts with tech companies as the war in Iran continues, with the conflict entering a fourth week.
In the days leading up to the war, the DOD and Anthropic clashed as the department sought unfettered access to its models for all "lawful purposes," while Anthropic wanted assurance that its models would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic "mass surveillance."
On Feb. 27, Hegseth posted that he was directing the DOD to apply the "supply chain risk" label on the company. The official notice came a week later as the department continued to use Anthropic's Claude model in Iran.
Anthropic filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration after the company was blacklisted and deemed a threat to U.S. national security. A preliminary hearing for the suit is scheduled for Tuesday in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California.