Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Microsoft AI Tour event in Munich, Germany, on February 25, 2026.
Sven Hoppe | Image Alliance | fake images
microsoft said Thursday that it will keep startup Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology integrated into its products for its customers, excluding the U.S. War Department.
Earlier on Thursday, the federal agency informed Anthropic that it would label the company a supply chain risk. Anthropic subsequently said it intends to challenge the move in court.
Last week, US President Donald Trump asked federal agencies to abandon the use of Anthropic, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said Anthropic would continue providing its services to the Pentagon for no more than six months. CNBC has confirmed that anthropogenic models played a role in US airstrikes against Iran in recent days.
Shortly after talks between the War Department and Anthropic on massive domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons collapsed on Friday, Anthropic’s rival OpenAI said the Pentagon had agreed to run its models for classified workloads.
Microsoft is the first major company to say it will continue working with Anthropic after the Pentagon’s actions. Some defense technology companies have told their employees to stop using Anthropic’s Claude models and migrate to alternatives.
“Our attorneys have studied the designation and have concluded that Anthropic products, including Claude, can remain available to our customers, other than the War Department, through platforms such as M365, GitHub, and Microsoft’s AI Foundry and that we can continue to work with Anthropic on non-defense projects,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC in an email.
Microsoft supplies its technology to a variety of US government agencies. Microsoft 365 productivity software is widely used within the War Department. In September, Microsoft said it was integrating Anthropic’s generative AI models into the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on for Microsoft 365 subscriptions, along with OpenAI models.
Anthropic’s Claude models have been adopted by many software engineers for writing source code and are available on the GitHub Copilot AI software development service, along with OpenAI’s competing Codex models.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella initially sought to invest in and work closely with OpenAI. More recently, Nadella has made AI models from other developers available in Microsoft products.
“Model choice!” Nadella wrote in an October X post showing the ability to switch between Anthropic and OpenAI models in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
In November, Microsoft said Anthropic had committed to spending $30 billion on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, while Microsoft agreed to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic. The numbers are higher for Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership. In October, Microsoft had a $135 billion stake in OpenAI’s public benefit corporation, and OpenAI was committing to spend $250 billion on Azure.
— CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
