Judge halts Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic, calling it illegal retaliation

A federal district judge, Rita Lin, has blocked the Defense Department’s designation of Anthropic as a national-security supply-chain risk, ruling in a 59-page order that the move was unlawful retaliation rather than a legitimate procurement decision. The court found the designation punished Anthropic for constitutionally protected speech and denied it due process, violating the First and Fifth Amendments. Lin wrote that while the military is free to pick whichever AI vendor it wants, the sweeping measures against Anthropic were ‘illegal and baseless,’ warning that invoking national security is not a blank check to retaliate against critics.

The fight traces back to Anthropic’s refusal to let its Claude models be used for U.S. surveillance or autonomous weapons, which it argued the technology is not reliable enough to support. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded by branding the company a supply-chain risk — reportedly the first public use of an obscure procurement statute for this purpose — effectively locking Anthropic out of certain military contracts. Company executives said the ban threatened billions in potential business.

The order is a preliminary injunction, not a final judgment, and the Pentagon is expected to appeal. Beyond Anthropic’s balance sheet, the ruling sets an early marker on how far the government can go in using security designations to pressure vendors that impose ethical limits on how their AI is deployed — a question that will shape how AI companies negotiate use restrictions with the defense establishment.