By David Jeans and Mike Stone
NEW YORK, March 4 (Reuters) – Palantir is the latest company to face the painful task of unwinding from Anthropic in the wake of the AI lab’s dispute with the Pentagon over safety guardrails, raising questions about a key military software platform.
Palantir’s Maven Smart Systems – a software platform that supplies militaries with intelligence analysis and weapons targeting – uses multiple prompts and workflows that were built using Anthropic’s Claude code, according to two people familiar with the matter.
U.S. President Donald Trump last week ordered the government to stop working with Anthropic after the AI lab reached an impasse in its row with the Pentagon over whether its policies could constrain autonomous weapons and government surveillance.
Palantir, which holds Maven-related contracts with the Defense Department and other U.S. national security agencies that have a potential value of more than $1 billion, will have to replace Claude with another AI model and rebuild parts of its software, one of the sources said. Reuters could not determine how long this process would take.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has suggested the change must be immediate, stating last week: “Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity” with Anthropic.
The Pentagon, Anthropic and Palantir declined to comment.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp weighed in on the Pentagon’s dispute on Tuesday without naming Anthropic, stating that Silicon Valley companies that claim AI will take white-collar jobs and also “screw the military” could lead toward “the nationalization of our technology,” according to his comments made at a defense tech conference in Washington, which were posted on X.
Anthropic’s role inside Maven underscores the messy and potentially costly challenge facing the Pentagon, other government agencies and U.S. companies as they face unwinding ties with a pivotal AI supplier that has become deeply embedded across public and private‑sector systems.
U.S. defense contractors, like Lockheed Martin, are expected to follow the Pentagon’s order to purge Anthropic’s prized AI tools from their supply chains, government contracting and technology attorneys said, even though the Trump administration’s ban on their use may fail in court.
Maven is the Pentagon’s flagship artificial‑intelligence program, designed to ingest data from multiple sources to identify military points of interest and speed up intelligence analysis and targeting decisions. The system has played a role in recent U.S. military operations. Reuters could not immediately determine whether the software platform was used during the January raid in Venezuela that captured former President Nicolas Maduro, or during the recent strikes on Iran.
Palantir’s software has become deeply embedded in the Pentagon’s drive to integrate artificial intelligence into military operations, a position that has elevated the company from a niche intelligence contractor into a core supplier for U.S. defense modernization efforts and helped propel its market value to around $350 billion.
(Reporting by David Jeans in New York and Mike Stone in Washington; Editing by Joe Brock and Matthew Lewis)
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