Palantir CTO: Pentagon has already replaced Anthropic's Claude models
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar said on CBS's Face the Nation that the Pentagon has already replaced Anthropic's models with no operational impact, after a dispute over safeguards for military AI in which the company was labelled a supply chain risk. He said the Department now uses models from xAI, OpenAI and Google, as well as open-weight models such as Nvidia's Nemotron, and that the ability to choose and switch models has been driving Palantir's commercial growth. Claude had been part of Palantir's Maven Smart System used by the Pentagon; Sankar also called effective altruism a "millenarian doomsday cult," described military targeting as a process rather than an AI choice, and disputed reporting on the September strike on a school in Minab, Iran, saying human error was the likely cause and that the final report should be awaited.
It signals that government buyers can switch frontier model suppliers relatively quickly, making model portability a central factor in AI contracts and safety debates.