Google says Anthropic remains available outside of defense projects
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.
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