Amazon said Friday it will continue offering Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology to its cloud customers, excluding work involving the Department of Defense.
The announcement comes after the federal agency informed Anthropic on Thursday that it would label the company a “supply chain risk.” Anthropic responded by saying it has “no choice” but to challenge the designation in court.
“AWS customers and partners can continue to use Claude for all their workloads not associated with the Department of War (DoW),” an Amazon Web Services spokesperson said in a statement. “For all DoW workloads which use Anthropic technologies, we are supporting customers and partners as they transition to alternatives running on AWS.”
Last week, President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies, via social media posts, to stop using Anthropic’s technology. The declaration came after Anthropic refused to agree to the DOD’s request that it be allowed to operate the company’s technology in all lawful use cases without limitation.
The supply chain risk designation will require defense vendors and contractors to certify they don’t use Anthropic’s models in their work with the Pentagon.
Amazon, the leader in public cloud, is following top rivals Microsoft and Google in updating customers on Anthropic’s availability. Microsoft said late Thursday that Anthropic’s Claude models will remain accessible in its products outside of defense work, and Google issued a similar statement earlier Friday.
Amazon is one of Anthropic’s biggest financial backers, investing $8 billion in the startup since 2023. The two companies have also forged a strong commercial relationship.
AWS remains Anthropic’s primary cloud and training partner. Anthropic also committed to use 500,000 of Amazon’s custom-built chips, called Trainium 2, as part of an $11 billion AWS data center campus built for the startup, called Project Rainier.
Anthropic’s Claude models are available through AWS Bedrock, which allows companies to tap into artificial intelligence models built by a variety of providers. AWS offers Bedrock to users of its GovCloud service, a dedicated cloud region equipped to host sensitive data and regulated workflows.
Amazon has won billions of dollars in contracts to provide cloud and AI services to federal agencies. The company in November earmarked up to $50 billion on AI infrastructure for U.S. government customers. At the time, AWS said it served more than 11,000 government agencies.
Anthropic relied on AWS as its pathway into government work. In November 2024, the company partnered with software and services vendor Palantir and AWS to provide defense and intelligence agencies access to Claude models.
Dave Levy, an AWS vice president, said in the announcement that, “We are excited to partner with Anthropic and Palantir and offer new generative AI capabilities that will drive innovation across the public sector.”
Eight months later, Anthropic was awarded a $200 million DOD contract and became the first AI lab to integrate its models into mission workflows on classified networks.
— CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
