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Today on the Daily Scoop podcast from the Scoop News Group. From NASA chatbots and treasury coding to drafting at opm, a look at how federal agencies have deployed Anthropic's Claude and the U.S. secret Service begins recruiting for an AI working group modeled after DHS's previous AI Corps. It's Thursday, March 5, 2026. Welcome to the Daily Scoop Podcast, where you'll hear the latest news and trends facing government leaders. I'm the host of the Daily Scoop Podcast, Billy Mitchell. Thanks so much for join joining me. Now let's dive into the day's top headlines. A range of AI use cases from coding assistance to workflow automation, face alteration or retirement as federal agencies work to comply with the Trump administration directive to remove Anthropic tools from their systems within the next six months. The recent clash between the clod maker and President Donald Trump comes after federal officials have spent years building up AI capabilities in government, including tools for and now a growing list of agencies are immediately dropping use of those services and in some cases replacing it with other providers. In recent days, the Department of the treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, NASA and the International Trade Administration all indicated to Fed Scoop that they have stopped or plan to stop using anthropic technologies in wake of the ban announced via Truth Social. That adds to previous statements and internal communications at the Department of Health and Human Services, the State Department and the General Services Administration. Trump's directive is the result of an escalated disagreement between Anthropic and the Department of Defense over how the technology should be used. While Trump accused Anthropic in his social media statement of attempting to strong arm the DOD with its terms of Service, CEO Dario Amade said the company simply wanted to maintain safeguards to ensure that its technology would not be used in mass surveillance but or fully autonomous weapons. While it began over a spat over defense related uses, the broadness of the mandate is having widespread impact beyond the military. Many of the publicly known applications on the chopping block were aimed at saving the workforce time. Read more about where Anthropic was, but is no longer being used in the federal government on fedscoop.com and now moving on to other news, the Secret Service is gearing up to launch what CIO and Chief AI Officer Chris Kraft is calling a new AI program which will act as a working group that comes and helps IT teams. Kraft told FedScoop at the Secret Service's headquarters Wednesday in Washington, D.C. that the group will consist of 10 members initially and will also be tasked with identifying areas of opportunity to implement AI and other emerging technologies. Kraft said that having that internal expertise will be really transformational for the Secret Service. The Secret Service already uses AI technologies for license plate identification, facial recognition and other threat analysis, and the new AI group will focus on iterating existing identification. Kraft initially joined the Secret Service as acting CIO. At the end of 2025, he was sworn in and took on the official title of Chief Information Officer and Chief AI Officer. Prior to the Secret Service, the senior official held leadership roles at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and most recently at the Department of Homeland Security headquarters. As Acting CTO and Deputy CTO of AI and Emerging Technology at DHS headquarters, Kraft primarily focused on AI efforts and leading the DHS AI core. The AI core is said to have been the largest dedicated federal AI team at its height, comprising 50 positions that brought in massive interest. More than 14,000 applications were fielded, with many of those coming from big tech companies like Meta and Google. Kraft said the Secret Service is trying to generate interest for the new AI program, pointing to recent LinkedIn posts that direct potential applicants to job postings and other promotional tactics that were used when recruiting started for the AI core. Kraft said the soon to be formed AI Working Group should resemble the AI Core team at DHS headquarters, calling that a great model. During its time at dhs, the AI Corps helped the agency build an enterprise wide generative AI tool and assisted across components. Reports suggest the team has since disbanded and remaining members were reassigned. Like other agencies, DHS saw its workforce squeezed over the past year, losing more than 800 IT managers in 14 months and 12,000 workers overall since the start of 2026, according to the Office of Personnel Management's federal workforce data. For more news at the intersection of the federal government and technology, make sure to visit fedscoop.com
