Anthropic has said it will sue the Defense Department over the designation, which could prevent the start-up from doing business with the U.S. government.
Although Anthropic is the only company that provides the Pentagon with artificial intelligence technologies for use on classified systems, other companies are angling to replace it.
“It’s critical to protect the civil liberties of Americans, and there was so much focus on this, that we wanted to make this point especially clear,” OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, center, wrote on social media.