Microsoft announced on Thursday that it will continue using the artificial intelligence technology developed by startup Anthropic to be integrated into its products for its clients, except the U.S. Department of War.
The federal agency had warned Anthropic earlier on Thursday that it would label the company a supply-chain risk. Anthropic subsequently claimed that it intends to challenge the move in court.
U.S. President Donald Trump last week ordered federal agencies to abandon the use of Anthropic, and the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, indicated that Anthropic would continue as a provider of services to the Pentagon for no longer than six months.
CNBC has confirmed that the Anthropic models were used in U.S. airstrikes on Iran in recent days.
Soon after the Department of War and Anthropic negotiations collapsed over mass domestic surveillance and absolutely autonomous weapons on Friday, Anthropic rival OpenAI reported that the Pentagon had settled on its models to run classified workloads.
Microsoft is the first tech giant to declare that it would continue collaborating with Anthropic following the actions of the Pentagon. Certain defense technology firms have instructed staff to cease using Anthropic Claude models and move to an alternative.
A Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC in an email, “Our lawyers have studied the designation and have concluded that Anthropic products, including Claude, can remain available to our customers — other than the Department of War — through platforms such as M365, GitHub, and Microsoft’s AI Foundry, and that we can continue to work with Anthropic on non-defense related projects.”
Microsoft distributes its technology to diverse government agencies in the US. The Microsoft 365 productivity software is widely used inside the Department of War.
Microsoft reported in September that it was incorporating the models of generative artificial intelligence of the company Anthropic into the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on to Microsoft 365 subscriptions, together with models of OpenAI.
Several software engineers have used the Claude models of Anthropic to write source code, which can be found in the GitHub Copilot AI software development service, and in the competing Codex models of OpenAI.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was the first to make investments and collaborate with OpenAI. More recently, Nadella has included AI models prepared by other programmers in Microsoft products.
Nadella wrote in an October X (formerly known as Twitter) post, “Model choice!”, demonstrating the ability to switch between the Anthropic and OpenAI models in Microsoft 365.
Microsoft on November, stated that Anthropic has pledged to invest in Microsoft’s Azure cloud services worth $30 billion, and Microsoft has committed to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic. The numbers are larger for Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership.
Microsoft had a $135 billion stake in the public benefit corporation of OpenAI as of October, and OpenAI was spending $250 billion on Azure.
