Anthropic is accusing the Pentagon of unlawful retaliation for refusing to ease safety restrictions on AI for military use.
Antropic and the administration of US President Donald Trump are heading to court over the US Department of Defense’s decision last month to sever ties with the artificial intelligence giant, which refused to allow unrestricted military use of its Claude AI model.
The legal showdown begins Tuesday in San Francisco, where Anthropic will petition a court to block a Pentagon-led ban enacted after the company refused to remove security barriers that prevent its artificial intelligence (AI) from being used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance.
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Federal District Judge Rita Lin, appointed by former US President Joe Biden, will preside over the hearing in San Francisco.
Supply chain complaints
On March 3, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic as a national security supply chain risk after the company refused to remove guardrails. This designation prohibits the use of this technology within the Department of Defense or by its contractors.
Anthropic’s designation marks the first time a U.S. company has been publicly designated as a supply chain risk under opaque government acquisition laws aimed at protecting military systems from foreign sabotage.
The AI companies filed a lawsuit by March 9, arguing that the administration’s move is an “unprecedented and unlawful” designation that violates free speech protections and due process rights that require the administration to follow certain protocols when making decisions.
“AI-enabled surveillance poses untold dangers to our democracy. Anthropic’s public advocacy of AI guardrails is laudable and protected by the First Amendment. It is not something the Department of Defense should be punishing,” Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said in a release on the lawsuit.
Suspicion of retaliation
In a filing last week, the White House rejected Anthropic’s claims that the government’s actions violated First Amendment free speech protections, saying the dispute stemmed from contract negotiations and national security concerns, not retaliation.
“Anthropic is unlikely to succeed on the merits. Anthropic is unlikely to be successful in showing that the Presidential Directive, the Secretary’s social media posts, and the Secretary’s decisions are retaliation for Anthropic’s representations regarding the safety of its models and the responsible use of AI,” the filing states.
“The record reflects that the President and Secretary were motivated by concerns about possible future actions if Anthropic retained access to government IT infrastructure. Those concerns were unrelated to Anthropic’s speech, and no one purported to restrict Anthropic’s expressive activities,” the filing states.
But legal experts and lawmakers have accused the White House of retaliating, including Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who sent a letter to Hegseth on Monday expressing concerns.
“My particular concern is that the Department of Defense is trying to coerce American companies into providing them with the tools to spy on American citizens and deploy fully autonomous weapons without adequate safeguards.”
Legal experts believe Anthropic will likely prevail, pointing to a Feb. 27 post on X in which Hegseth said he was directing the Department of Defense to “designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk to national security.”
The post also said that U.S. military contractors, suppliers and partners are prohibited from “commercial activities with Anthropic.”
“It (X-Post) went far beyond what the law allows, and it also said the Department of Defense had not done anything necessary before declaring a supply chain risk under the law,” Charlie Bullock, a senior fellow at the Institute for Law and AI, told Al Jazeera.
“This is clearly illegal and the government has now acknowledged that in its submissions, saying instead that everyone should ignore it and that the actual supply chain designation was made days later.”
Judge Lin’s decision on the preliminary injunction will determine whether the administration can effectively “blacklist” American companies that refuse to comply with military directives.
