Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, confirmed the Defense Department is actively installing alternative large-language models to replace Anthropic’s Claude, which has been in use for U.S. military operations in Iran, though he said the transition will take more than a month. OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI have already won approval to perform classified Pentagon work, while Google is rolling out its Gemini AI agents across the Pentagon’s 3 million-person workforce, starting on unclassified networks before moving into classified systems. Anthropic had been the only AI system operating in the Pentagon’s classified cloud before the fallout, and the supply-chain risk designation threatens its $200M Pentagon contract and could bar it from partnering with other companies on defense work.
