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In response to the Pentagon’s demand that Anthropic remove safeguards that prevent Claude models from being used for mass domestic surveillance and in fully autonomous weapons or else be designated a supply chain risk, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei rejected these demands on Thursday: “These threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.” Referring to the disputed use cases for Claude, Amodei stated that "such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now."

After Anthropic refused to remove safeguards from their Claude family of models, President Trump directed all federal agencies to immediately stop using Claude on Friday, following through with the threat to label the company a supply chain risk. According to Trump, the U.S. “WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS,” which, I don’t know, maybe would be appropriate to say if Anthropic had perhaps dictated how the U.S. military fights and win wars instead of keeping in place safeguards on their AI models, them being a private company and all.

Hours after Trump labelled Anthropic a national security risk, OpenAI announced a deal with the Department of Defense to use its models for classified networks. In a follow-up statement, OpenAI outlined that the partnership includes three “red lines”: no use of OpenAI technology (1) for mass domestic surveillance, (2) to direct autonomous weapons systems, and (3) for high-stakes automated decisions (the first two of which look eerily similar to Anthropic’s red lines). In their statement, OpenAI was quick to acknowledge the similarity of their red lines to those of Anthropic, claiming in addition that they are more enforceable than Anthropic’s.

And, finally, the chaser: In the wake of the Pentagon-AI hullabaloo on Thursday and Friday, Claude passed ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app in the Apple App Store over the weekend.

In non-Pentagon-related news, last week Google released Nano Banana 2, a successor to their popular AI image generation tool. Features include “advanced world knowledge,” the ability to pull information from Gemini in process of creating images, increased speed, closer adherence of output images to their underlying prompts, and improved text rendering.

Lean TECHniques works alongside Midwest companies to leverage technology for business impact. Through advisory, coaching, and embedded delivery, Lean TECHniques helps organizations develop high-performing teams, create environments that fuel innovation, and deliver best-in-class customer experiences. Core areas of expertise include software, cloud, artificial intelligence, product management, and technology leadership.

March 25: Google was a little late to the Gen AI party, but it caught up quick. Our 3-hour Google Gemini Virtual Workshop will show you all the ways Gemini can help boost your productivity in 2026. Sign up by 3/11 for early bird pricing.

Our AI Lunch Club series continues with one more FREE virtual event to help you better understand generative AI tools.

This events is free thanks to a sponsorship from technology and management consultancy, Lean TECHniques.

Google Labs has a new experiment called CC. It’s an AI productivity agent that connects to your Gmail, Calendar and Drive and then delivers a personalized "Your Day Ahead" briefing every morning. Users can teach CC about yourself, correct information, or add to-dos simply by emailing CC. Join the CC waitlist here.

We challenged our students to make weather graphics worthy of sharing on social media last week in class. So we decided to test out a style of our own using Nano Banana 2.

Thinking about switching from your current AI chat tool to Claude? Anthropic is making it easy to bring all of your memory with you - if you have a paid plan on Claude. (Update: Claude free accounts now include memory). Here are the instructions.