Anthropic sues Pentagon to lift blacklisting
What happened
Anthropic on Monday sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Defense Department and several other federal agencies in federal court, arguing that the administration’s move to blacklist the AI firm as a national security risk was “unprecedented and unlawful.” The Constitution “does not allow the government to wield its enormous power to punish a company for its protected speech,” Anthropic said in its filing. Hegseth last week formally designated the company a “supply chain risk” over Anthropic’s insistence that its AI tool Claude not be used for autonomous lethal weapons or mass surveillance of Americans. President Donald Trump said on social media that all federal agencies must stop using Claude within six months.
Who said what
The supply-chain risk designation “effectively cuts off Anthropic’s work with the Defense Department” and its contractors, The New York Times said, and it “has never been used on an American company.” The label is “usually reserved for Chinese and Russian firms suspected of helping foreign spies,” The Washington Post said. The Pentagon’s “unprecedented step” came “even as Anthropic’s tools were playing a central role” in “Trump’s bombing campaign in Iran.” “It is absurd for the government to argue that Anthropic is the kind of company meant to be addressed by this statute,” especially when the Pentagon “has repeatedly sought to obtain Anthropic’s services for national defense,” Georgetown University law professor Mark Jia told the Post. It would be “perfectly reasonable” for the Pentagon to cancel its contracts with Anthropic because they don’t believe a private company should set policy or determine when “autonomous lethal weapons are ready for prime time,” Dean Ball, a former Trump White House AI policy adviser, said on “The Ezra Klein Show.” But they don’t have the “statutory power” to “completely destroy the company” in “a kind of political assassination.”
What next?
The White House is “preparing an executive order formally instructing the federal government to rip out Anthropic’s AI from its operations,” Axios said, and it “could be issued as soon as this week.” Anthropic’s “standoff with the Defense Department has cost it Uncle Sam as a customer,” The Wall Street Journal said, but it has also brought a “surge of public goodwill” and a “momentary advantage in the ferocious talent war between rival artificial intelligence labs.”