Adds State Department switching to OpenAI in headline and paragraphs 1, 5-6
WASHINGTON, March 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury Department, State Department and the federal housing agency are terminating all use of Anthropic products, with the State Department saying it will switch to rival OpenAI, after President Donald Trump ordered government agencies to dump Anthropic's technology, including its Claude platform.
Trump on Friday directed the government to stop work with Anthropic, and the Pentagon said it would declare the AI startup a supply-chain risk, dealing a major blow to the artificial intelligence lab after a showdown about technology guardrails.
The Treasury Department is terminating all use of Anthropic products, including Claude, Secretary Scott Bessent said in a post on X on Monday.
William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, also said in a post on X that his department and U.S. mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are terminating all use of Anthropic products.
The U.S. State Department is switching the model powering its in-house chatbot, StateChat, from Anthropic to OpenAI, according to a memo seen by Reuters.
"For now, StateChat will use GPT4.1 from OpenAI," the memo said, adding that further information would be available down the line.
The State Department did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
Trump said that there would be a six-month phase-out for the Defense Department and other agencies that use Anthropic's products.
These actions mark an extraordinary rebuke by Washington against one of the premier companies that have kept the U.S. in the lead on national-security-critical AI. Anthropic now could become a pariah, a status previously reserved for enemy suppliers.
Late on Friday, rival OpenAI announced its own deal to deploy technology in the Defense Department's classified network.
(Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones, Juby Babu and Raphael Satter; editing by David Ljunggren, Michelle Nichols, Alan Barona and David Gregorio)
((david.ljunggren@tr.com; +1 647 480 7891))