Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei confirmed that the U.S. government declared his company a supply chain risk on Thursday and said it has “no choice” but to challenge the designation in court.

The startup has been at odds with the Department of Defense in recent weeks over how its artificial intelligence models, known as Claude, can be used. Anthropic wanted assurance that its technology would not be tapped for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance, but the DOD wanted Anthropic to grant the agency unfettered access to Claude across all lawful purposes.

“As we stated last Friday, we do not believe, and have never believed, that it is the role of Anthropic or any private company to be involved in operational decision-making—that is the role of the military,” Amodei wrote. “Our only concerns have been our exceptions on fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, which relate to high-level usage areas, and not operational decision-making.”

Anthropic is the only American company ever to be publicly named a supply chain risk, and the designation will require defense vendors and contractors to certify that they don’t use the company’s models in their work with the Pentagon. The label has typically been reserved for organizations that operate within foreign adversaries, like the Chinese tech company Huawei. 

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