finance Mar 06, 2026

Google joins Microsoft in telling users Anthropic is still available outside defense projects

C

CNBC Finance

3 min read
Key Points
  • Google said that it will keep working with Anthropic on non-defense projects after the Department of Defense blacklisted the company from federal contracts.
  • Google's announcement comes a day after Microsoft told users that Anthropic's technology will still be available outside of defense.
  • Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei confirmed late Thursday that the U.S. government declared his company a supply chain risk and said it has “no choice” but to challenge the designation in court.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google's annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 20, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google said it will continue offering Anthropic's artificial intelligence technology for clients, excluding for defense work, a day after Microsoft issued a similar statement to customers.

The announcements from two of the three leading cloud infrastructure vendors follow the Defense Department's official designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk.

"We understand that the Determination does not preclude us from working with Anthropic on non-defense related projects, and their products remain available through our platforms, like Google Cloud," a Google spokesperson said Friday.

Amazon, the leader in public cloud, still hasn't issued a comment on the matter.

Anthropic's Claude models are available through Google Cloud via the Vertex AI platform. The search giant is also a significant financial backer of Anthropic and, in January 2025, agreed to an additional $1 billion investment, adding to its previous $2 billion stake.

Anthropic uses Google Cloud's AI infrastructure to train its models, and recently expanded the partnership by gaining access to up to 1 million of Google's custom tensor processing units (TPUs).

After Anthropic refused to agree to the DOD's requested terms of use last week, President Donald Trump instructed federal agencies to stop using the company's technology, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said its work with Anthropic would wind down over six months. CNBC has confirmed that Anthropic models were used by the U.S. in its latest attack on Iran.

Some defense technology companies have told employees to stop using Anthropic's Claude models and to switch to alternatives, including from rival OpenAI.

Microsoft was the first major partner to say it will keep working with Anthropic after the Pentagon's actions.

"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," Microsoft said late Thursday.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on Thursday that his company has “no choice” but to challenge the supply chain risk designation in court.

— CNBC's Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

WATCH: Morgan Stanley's David Chen on AI shift that's keeping Wall Street up at night

Get Gold Price Tracker & Alerts

Free on iOS & Android

Install