Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, speaks to “The Circuit with Emily Chang” at Anthropic’s headquarters in San Francisco, California, on Thursday, April 30, 2026.
Jason Henry | Bloomberg | Getty Images
human is seeking rehearing in federal court in Washington, D.C., of a lawsuit over the Department of Defense’s blacklisting of its AI models.
“The Secretary of the Army has accused Anthropic, a U.S. AI company whose models serve the national defense, of being a national security ‘supply chain risk’ because it did not allow its models to be used for mass surveillance or lethal autonomous warfare of Americans and publicly explained its commitment to AI safety,” Anthropic’s lawyers said in a petition filed Tuesday. “A divided committee upheld that unusual designation.”
The Pentagon, led by Pete Hegseth, applied supply chain risk labels in March to prevent defense contractors from using the company’s technology in their work with the Pentagon. This comes after negotiations broke down over how the military could use Anthropic’s Claude AI model.
Antropic sued the Trump administration to reverse that action. In September, the D.C. Circuit upheld the Pentagon’s blacklisting. The 2-1 ruling rejected Antropic’s argument that the Pentagon’s ban on Claude models was arbitrary, unauthorized, and unconstitutional.
Anthropic’s lawyers said in a filing Tuesday that the court ignored “clear evidence that this designation was in retaliation for Anthropic’s speech on the safety of AI.”
Anthropic served as an early partner for many U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Defense, until the conflict between the two companies became public knowledge earlier this year. Anthropic was awarded a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense in July 2025, but negotiations broke down when the company began negotiations to introduce Claude to the Pentagon’s GenAI.mil AI platform in September of the same year.
Anthropic representatives declined to comment beyond the details of the application. The Department of Defense did not respond to requests for comment.
—CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
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