The AI Power Struggle: Pentagon Can Bar Anthropic's AI, Amazon Blocks Meta's Shopping Agent
By NewsPulse Staff | September 26, 2026
Artificial intelligence is no longer just a technology story — it is a power story. This week, the fight over who controls AI, who gets to use it, and what limits apply played out in a federal courtroom, in corporate boardrooms, and at the White House.
Pentagon vs. Anthropic: the court sides with the Defense Department
A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the Department of Defense can lawfully bar Anthropic's artificial intelligence technology from military use, delivering a significant legal setback to the AI company in its long-running dispute with the Trump administration.
In a 2-1 decision, the D.C. Circuit upheld the Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a "supply chain risk," allowing the department to continue blocking federal agencies and military contractors from using Anthropic's Claude models on its systems.
The dispute dates to earlier this year, when Anthropic declined a Pentagon request to permit its AI to be used for what the department called "all lawful purposes." The company pointed to its own policies against enabling autonomous weapons systems and mass surveillance of Americans. In response, the administration designated the company a supply chain risk in March 2026, effectively cutting off its access to defense-related federal business.
The majority found the Pentagon had ample support for its national-security concerns, while the dissent argued the government had stretched the underlying statute too far. The ruling also rejected Anthropic's free-speech claim, concluding the exclusion stemmed from a contract dispute rather than the company's public advocacy for AI regulation.
Amazon vs. Meta: the battle for AI shopping
Meanwhile, a different kind of AI turf war is heating up in e-commerce. Amazon has blocked Meta's Muse AI agent from browsing and buying products on its platform, saying the agent lacked authorization to access customer accounts, scrape data, or process purchases.
The dispute highlights a growing conflict over who controls the customer relationship in the age of AI shopping assistants. Retailers are split: Walmart is working with Google and OpenAI to make its products discoverable through outside AI agents, while Amazon is drawing a hard line around its own ecosystem.
At stake is enormous influence over how Americans discover and buy products. If AI agents become the middlemen between shoppers and stores, the companies that control those agents — or the platforms they operate on — will wield extraordinary power over commerce.
All eyes on September 29
The next act comes Tuesday, when President Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and top technology CEOs are scheduled to meet at the White House to discuss AI policy, according to reports. Details of the agenda have not been released, but the guest list alone signals how central AI has become to Washington's agenda.
The politics of AI took an unusual turn this week when Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, and Steve Bannon, a conservative Trump ally, appeared at the same Washington event to argue that AI development should be slowed and coordinated internationally. Their shared alarm — from opposite ends of the political spectrum — shows how the technology is scrambling traditional alliances.
Trump, for his part, remains a fierce defender of rapid AI development, arguing the U.S. needs no new AI-specific regulations and must stay ahead of China. Whether Tuesday's meeting produces policy or just photo opportunities, the struggle over AI's future is only intensifying.
Why this week mattered
Taken together, the week's events show AI governance fragmenting across every possible venue: courts deciding which companies can sell to the military, platforms deciding which agents can shop on their turf, and politicians from opposite ideological poles converging on the need to slow down. There is no single table where all of these questions get answered — which means the power struggle will keep playing out in parallel, in public and behind closed doors, for a long time to come.