US Blacklists Anthropic but Its Spy Agencies Still Use Claude
The US blacklisted Anthropic as a security threat. Its spy agencies are using Claude anyway.
May 24, 2026 – 3:53 pm
Image by: TechCrunch
TL;DR
A chip shortage forced the NSA to keep using Anthropic’s AI despite a Pentagon blacklist. The White House approved $9B for classified data centers.
The Problem
The Pentagon has officially blacklisted Anthropic as a national security supply chain threat. However, the NSA is using Anthropic’s AI because there are no alternatives, driven by a critical shortage of advanced chips needed to run frontier AI models on classified networks.
The Compromise
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles authorized the National Security Agency to continue using an advanced Anthropic model, Claude, according to the New York Times. This decision was taken due to the chip shortage, which has prevented spy agencies from fully installing or testing the latest AI tools.
Funding Request
Along with this compromise, a secret $9 billion emergency funding request was approved by the White House to help America’s premier spy agencies secure the high-end semiconductors required for running generative AI on top-secret infrastructure. This money will fund specialized federal data centers built for Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell superchip infrastructure.
The Urgency
Congress will formally vote to approve the package. In the meantime, the White House is redirecting $800 million from other government budgets to begin purchasing computing capacity immediately. This urgency arises from the fear that China will seize the computational advantage in global intelligence operations.
AI’s Role
The military and intelligence services rely on AI to analyze millions of intercepted communications, satellite images, and data points. A chip shortage that stalls these tools is considered a national security emergency by the government.
The Contradiction
The same government that designated Anthropic a supply chain threat is now dependent on Anthropic’s models due to its inability to run alternatives on its own infrastructure. This operational dependency arises from the fact that Claude is among the most capable reasoning models available.
Anthropic’s Capabilities
Anthropic’s Project Glasswing, which gives 50 select partners access to Claude Mythos for vulnerability discovery, found more than 10,000 critical flaws in one month. This positions Anthropic as both a powerful AI security tool and a supply chain risk for the Pentagon.
The Chip Shortage
The chip shortage extends beyond the intelligence community, with memory reallocation from consumer electronics to AI also constraining the government’s ability to build classified AI infrastructure.