Tech companies aren't slowing relationships with Anthropic
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Tech companies aren't pulling back from Anthropic even after the Pentagon labeled the AI lab a supply chain risk, with major partners and enterprise customers telling Axios they aren't changing their contracts.
Why it matters: The Trump administration tried to kneecap one of the world's most powerful AI companies. So far, it's just giving it a leg up.
The big picture: Anthropic is raking in more revenue and attention than it did before President Trump and the Pentagon went after the company.
- The designation looked like it could hit Anthropic where it hurts most: enterprise contracts, its core revenue driver. The opposite happened.
- "I've seen enough. Anthropic is the new default for businesses," Ara Kharazian, lead economist at Ramp, said in a post with new data indicating a surge in the share of enterprises choosing Anthropic over OpenAI for their first AI contracts.
- Anthropic's enterprise revenue has continued to grow since the designation was applied, according to Pitchbook. Meanwhile, Claude has surged to the top spot on U.S. app downloads.
What they're saying: "We continue to work really, really closely with them, and we have no plans, in terms of the responsibility I have, to change anything," said Brian Delahunty, VP of engineering at Google.
- Delahunty told Axios that he recently spoke with Anthropic's CTO about continued partnership.
- Multiple Fortune 500 enterprises have told Axios they are not currently making any changes to their Anthropic contracts.
Context: President Trump called for the government to stop using Claude, giving agencies six months to phase out existing deployments.
- Anthropic is suing the Pentagon over the supply chain risk designation, further fueling uncertainty for companies on how the label will be interpreted and enforced.
- Tech industry groups and employees are rallying around Anthropic, filing amicus briefs calling for a pause to the designation.
Zoom out: For many companies, Anthropic's models are simply too valuable to abandon.
- The AI lab has become a core provider of enterprise AI tools used for coding, research and business automation, embedding its models deep inside modern software stacks.
- "If you had to rip the tool out because of some policy or regulatory issue, it's a big deal. These are hard changes to make, and I don't think anyone expected it to get so sticky and so difficult to remove," Bret Greenstein, chief AI officer at consulting firm West Monroe, told Axios.
The bottom line: The White House wanted to isolate Anthropic, but the private sector has already voted.
- Until the courts decide the designation's fate, Anthropic isn't being treated as a risk. It's being treated as the new enterprise default.
