By MATT O’BRIEN and KONSTANTIN TOROPIN

The Trump administration is following through with its threat to designate artificial intelligence company Anthropic as a supply chain risk in an unprecedented move that could force other government contractors to stop using the AI chatbot Claude.

The Pentagon said in a statement Thursday that it has “officially informed Anthropic leadership the company and its products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately.”

The decision appeared to shut down the opportunity for further negotiation with Anthropic, nearly a week after President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused the company of endangering national security.

FILE – Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stands outside the Pentagon during a welcome ceremony for the Japanese defense minister at the Pentagon in Washington, Jan. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf, File)

Trump and Hegseth announced a series of threatened punishments last Friday, on the eve of the Iran war, after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to back down over concerns the company’s products could be used for mass surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.

The San Francisco-based company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. It has previously vowed to sue if the Pentagon pursued what the company described as a “legally unsound” action “never before publicly applied to an American company.”

The Pentagon didn’t reply to questions in time for publication.

Some military contractors were already cutting ties with Anthropic, a rising star in the tech industry that sells Claude to a variety of businesses and government agencies. Lockheed Martin said it will “follow the President’s and the Department of War’s direction” and look to other providers of large language models.

“We expect minimal impacts as Lockheed Martin is not dependent on any single LLM vendor for any portion of our work,” the company said. It’s not yet clear if the designation aims to block Anthropic’s use by all federal government contractors or just those that partner with the military.

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The Pentagon’s decision to apply a rule designed to address supply threats posed by foreign adversaries was quickly met with criticism from both opponents and some supporters of Trump’s Republican administration. Federal codes have defined supply chain risk as a “risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert” a system in order to disrupt, degrade or spy on it.

U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee, called it “a dangerous misuse of a tool meant to address adversary-controlled technology.”

“This reckless action is shortsighted, self-destructive, and a gift to our adversaries,” she said in a written statement Thursday.

Neil Chilson, a Republican former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission who now leads AI policy at the Abundance Institute, said the decision looks like “massive overreach that would hurt both the U.S. AI sector and the military’s ability to acquire the best technology for the U.S. warfighter.”

Earlier in the day, a group of former defense and national security officials sent a letter to U.S. lawmakers expressing “serious concern” about the designation.

“The use of this authority against a domestic American company is a profound departure from its intended purpose and sets a dangerous precedent,” said the letter from former officials and policy experts, including former CIA director Michael Hayden and retired Air Force, Army and Navy leaders.

They added that such a designation is meant to “protect the United States from infiltration by foreign adversaries — from companies beholden to Beijing or Moscow, not from American innovators operating transparently under the rule of law. Applying this tool to penalize a U.S. firm for declining to remove safeguards against mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons is a category error with consequences that extend far beyond this dispute.”

ARCHIVO – Dario Amodei, CEO y cofundador de Anthropic, asiste a la reunión anual del Foro Económico Mundial en Davos, Suiza, el 23 de enero de 2025. (AP Foto/Markus Schreiber, Archivo)

While losing its big partnerships with defense contractors, Anthropic experienced a surge of consumer downloads over the past week due to people siding with its moral stance. Anthropic has boasted of more than a million people signing up for Claude each day this week, lifting it past OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini as the top AI app in more than 20 countries in Apple’s app store.

The dispute with the Pentagon has also further deepened Anthropic’s bitter rivalry with OpenAI, which it announced a Friday deal with the Pentagon to effectively replace Anthropic with ChatGPT in classified environments.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman later said he’s saying he shouldn’t have rushed a deal that “looked opportunistic and sloppy.”

By JACK DURA

FARGO, N.D. (AP) — The North Dakota Highway Patrol’s newest recruit has floppy ears, four legs and an amazing knack for finding people.

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Beau, a 12-week-old puppy, is joining a band of bloodhounds who are in demand for difficult cases across the upper Midwest.

They trail missing children, people with dementia and criminal suspects. The agency uses drones and aircraft to aid searches, but bloodhounds remain an age-old, low-tech solution.

“These dogs are just specifically bred to search for people,” said Trooper Steven Mayer, who handles Bleu, one of the dogs.

The nose knows

Bloodhounds are used from Maine to Florida to Texas to Arizona to California, said Danny Jones, executive director of the U.S. Police Canine Association. Drones and helicopters can work ahead of a dog, but the bloodhound is hard to beat.

“To actually get a direction and start moving in a direction, you’re going to need a dog on the ground to start that trail, and that’s the difference between the technology and actually having a dog such as a bloodhound on the ground,” Jones said.

Bloodhounds have about 300 million scent receptors in their nose, vastly more than humans and more than other dogs, Mayer said.

Their big, floppy ears and folds of skin help gather odor for the dog to trail people, sometimes after a week or more, he said. The dogs have scented from a wall someone touched, the dirt a person stumbled in and vomit on a car door.

North Dakota Highway Patrol Trooper Steven Mayer and Bleu, a bloodhound, stand for a photo, Feb. 11, 2026, near the state Capitol in Bismarck, N.D. (AP Photo/Jack Dura)

Busy schedules

Highway Patrol began using bloodhounds about 14 years ago, moving away from dual-purpose dogs to singular-purpose drug dogs and trailing dogs. The state force receives about 70 calls a year for their services, including one to Montana last year to help find a man suspected in the killing of four people at an Anaconda bar.

Two pairs of handlers and dogs drove 10 hours to help. They got fairly close to the suspect, who was in the location where the dogs were indicating on, Mayer said. Other requests have come from South Dakota and Utah.

A North Dakota Highway Patrol bloodhound named Beau sits for a photo Friday, Feb. 27, 2026, outside the Highway Patrol office in Fargo, N.D. (AP Photo/Jack Dura)

Beau was born in Texas but has since moved to North Dakota’s largest city of Fargo. His early training is mostly potty and kennel training and basic commands, as well as socializing him to different places, people and environments, said Trooper Dustin Pattengale, Beau’s handler. He won’t be ready for a full or certified trail until he is about 9 months old.

“The basic training is just introducing him to scent articles and then ramping up the training to where he goes further and further and encompasses different trails, different types of environment,” Pattengale said.

Bloodhounds are high-drive, loving and caring but can be stubborn, slobbery and naughty, and they’re not a dog for an apartment, Mayer said.

His partner, Bleu, is a big, friendly dog with one eye, having lost the other following an injury playing with another bloodhound. His trailing abilities are not hindered, Mayer said.

North Dakota Highway Patrol Trooper Steven Mayer watches as Bleu, a bloodhound, sniffs the air, Feb. 11, 2026, near the state Capitol in Bismarck, N.D. (AP Photo/Jack Dura)

Beau is a growing puppy, his long ears wet from dragging on the ground as he explored a blanket of snow, sniffing constantly. He likes his beef liver treats.

“He is a very energetic young pup. He’s pretty relaxed for the most part, most days, but he is eager. He likes to work. He likes to sniff,” Pattengale said.

New tool in Omaha

In addition to searches, North Dakota has helped agencies in other ways. Last year, Mayer went to Omaha, Nebraska, for a week to help the city police department train its first bloodhound, Willow.

Omaha used to call in the closest bloodhounds, from the Chicago area, for searches, Omaha Police Sgt. Scott Warner said. The value was clear and Willow arrived early last year.

He hopes Willow becomes an asset for the region. Omaha plans to have multiple dogs and handlers someday, he said.

Willow has trailed missing people, including an elderly man on Christmas Eve, through falling darkness, steep hills, mud and water.

Finding mentors for training is crucial, Warner said. Much of the bloodhound community is word-of-mouth, he said.

“I had no idea that North Dakota had a bloodhound program. There’s not a directory that I can look at that tells me where dogs are,” Warner said.

Handlers drop everything to go

Mayer and his wife have traveled the world to help train dogs, making trips to Hungary, Italy, South Africa and Wales, with plans later this year to go to Slovenia and Austria. They charge nothing.

Beau, a bloodhound puppy, licks the face of his handler, North Dakota Highway Patrol Trooper Dustin Pattengale, on Friday, Feb. 27, 2026, outside the Highway Patrol office in Fargo, N.D. (AP Photo/Jack Dura)

Handlers are a special breed of people, Mayer said.

“They drop everything at the drop of a hat and they’ll leave their family, their friends, they’ll leave Easter dinner to go find a stranger that they’ve never met before,” he said.

North Dakota’s dogs are something of a social media sensation for the Highway Patrol. Beau’s name was picked in a Facebook vote. Recent videos depict him chewing a toy bear and another bloodhound, Lorace, gallivanting in new boots.

“Everybody loves a dog, I mean, especially these little babies, these floppy-eared ones,” said Mayer, who hopes the dogs’ visibility yields earlier calls for their assistance.

“The more word we can get out about the program and the faster we get calls on it, the easier we can get out and be available to help people,” he said.

By LAURA UNGAR

Last year, President Donald Trump told pregnant women not to take Tylenol as he promoted unproven ties between the fever reducer and autism and touted an old generic drug as a treatment for the developmental condition.

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For nearly three months after that, new research found, Tylenol orders for pregnant women showing up in emergency rooms dropped and prescriptions of the generic drug for children rose. This happened despite sharp criticism of the president’s message from doctor groups saying that the drug, leucovorin, shouldn’t be broadly used for autism and Tylenol is safe during pregnancy.

“It just shows that in our country right now, health care has been politicized in a way that political messages are driving and impacting care — and not always for good,” said Dr. Susan Sirota, a pediatrician in Highland Park, Illinois, who wasn’t involved with the research.

Doctors, who published their work Thursday in The Lancet, looked at changes in drug ordering or prescribing compared with projected trends, or what might have happened if things had continued on the same path as before the White House briefing.

They found that orders for Tylenol – also known by the generic names acetaminophen and paracetamol – were 10% lower than predicted for pregnant emergency department patients aged 15 to 44. And outpatient prescriptions of leucovorin for children aged 5 to 17 were 71% higher than expected during the same study period, late September to early December.

Researchers observed no similar shifts in comparable medications, suggesting the changes were directly tied to the briefing.

The research had limitations. For example, it didn’t capture all Tylenol use by pregnant women because most people buy the painkiller over the counter outside of a hospital setting.

Still, it reflected how an unconventional news conference by a political leader could change not just patient behavior but prescribing as well, said co-author Dr. Michael Barnett.

In past administrations, “there are lots of layers of approval and expert consensus” before officials make big announcements about medical topics, said Barnett, who is with Brown University School of Public Health.

Pregnant women generally take Tylenol for pain or fever. Untreated fevers in pregnancy, particularly in the first trimester, increase the risk for miscarriages, preterm birth and other problems, according to the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine. Some studies have raised the possibility that taking Tylenol in pregnancy might be associated with a risk of autism, but many others haven’t found a connection.

Leucovorin is a derivative of folic acid used for, among other things, reducing the toxic side effects of certain chemotherapy drugs and treating a rare blood disorder. It has also been studied for a neurological condition known as cerebral folate deficiency and for a subset of autistic children, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The pediatrics group doesn’t recommend routine use of the drug for autistic children. Early, small-scale studies have explored its use, “and some findings suggest potential benefit in carefully selected cases,” the group said.

But evidence remains limited, the pediatrician group said. And in late January, the European Journal of Pediatrics retracted a study evaluating leucovorin as an autism treatment.

Still, after the federal announcement about the drug, Sirota said some families in her practice asked about getting it for their autistic children. She educated them about the evidence, told them about the potential for side effects and didn’t prescribe it. Potential side effects include irritability, nausea and vomiting and skin issues like dermatitis.

Sirota said it has been hard to deal with the repercussions of government pronouncements like the ones on autism.

“It feels like a pattern with our government, right? They keep building on these houses of cards that just fall down,” she said. “This politicizing of medicine just in general, and moving away from science, has been so challenging.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By ALANNA DURKIN RICHER

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Thursday released additional Jeffrey Epstein files involving uncorroborated accusations made by a woman against President Donald Trump that the department said had been mistakenly withheld during an earlier review.

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The department said last week that it was working to determine if any records were improperly withheld after several news organizations reported that the massive tranche of records that had been made public didn’t include some files documenting a series of interviews conducted in 2019 with a woman who made an allegation against Trump.

The accuser was interviewed by the FBI four times as it sought to assess her account but a summary of only one of those interviews had been included in the publicly released files.

On Thursday, the department said those files had been “incorrectly coded as duplicative,” and therefore were inadvertently not published along with other investigative documents related to the disgraced financier, who killed himself while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019.

“As we have consistently done, if any member of the public reported concerns with information in the library, the Department would review, make any corrections, and republish online,” the department said in a post on X.

Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. The department noted in January that some of the documents contain “untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi listens as she testifies before a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)

The new disclosures come as Attorney General Pam Bondi faces continued turmoil over the department’s handling of the files released under a law passed by Congress after months of public and political pressure. Five Republicans on the House Oversight Committee joined Democrats in voting Wednesday to subpoena Bondi, demanding that she answer questions under oath in a sign of mounting frustration among members of the president’s own party.

The Trump administration has faced constant political headaches since the rollout of the files began in December, with critics accusing the department of hiding certain documents or over-redacting files, or in some cases, not redacting enough. In some cases, the department inadvertently released nude photos showing the faces of potential victims as well as names, email addresses and other identifying information that was either unredacted or not fully obscured.

Department officials have defended their handling of the files, saying they took pains to release the files as quickly as possible under the law while also protecting victims. Department officials have said errors were inevitable given the volume of the materials, the number of lawyers viewing the files and the speed at which the department had to release them. The department has said it’s entitled to withhold records that exposed potential abuse victims, were duplicates or protected by legal privileges, or related to an ongoing criminal investigation.

Some of the new records published Thursday pertained to a woman who contacted the FBI shortly after Epstein’s 2019 arrest and claimed that a man named “Jeff” living in Hilton Head, South Carolina, had raped her there in the 1980s when she was around 13 years old. The woman told the agents she didn’t know the man’s identity at the time, but decades later concluded he was Jeffrey Epstein when a friend texted her his photo from a news story.

In a follow-up interview a month later, the woman added a host of other claims, including that Epstein had schemed to have her mother sent to prison, beaten her, arranged sexual encounters with other men and once flew her to either New Jersey or New York, where she claimed to have bitten Donald Trump after he tried to sexually assault her.

Agents spoke with the woman two more times, at one point asking her to provide more detail on her supposed interactions with Trump, but reported that she declined to answer additional questions and broke off contact. There’s no indication that Epstein ever lived in South Carolina and it was unclear whether Trump and Epstein knew each other during the time period involved.

The woman’s report was one of a number of uncorroborated, sometimes fantastical, reports that federal agents received from members of the public alleging misconduct by Trump and other famous people in the months and years after Epstein’s arrest.