Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Microsoft AI Tour event in Munich, Germany, on Feb. 25, 2026
Sven Hoppe | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Microsoft said Thursday that it will keep startup Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology embedded in its products for clients, excluding the U.S. Department of War.
The statement comes on the same day the federal agency informed Anthropic that it would label the company a supply-chain risk. Anthropic subsequently said it intends to challenge the move in court.
“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 — through platforms such as M365, GitHub, and Microsoft’s AI Foundry and that we can continue to work with Anthropic on non-defense related projects,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC in an email.
Microsoft supplies its technology to a variety of U.S. government agencies. The Microsoft 365 productivity software is widely used inside the Department of War. In September Microsoft said it was integrating Anthropic’s generative artificial intelligence models into the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on for Microsoft 365 subscriptions, alongside models from OpenAI.
Many software engineers have adopted Anthropic’s Claude models for drafting source code, and they are available inside GitHub Copilot, as are OpenAI’s competing Codex models.
This is developing news. Please check back for updates.