Appeals Court Lets Pentagon Keep Anthropic on Its Blacklist
Appeals Court Lets Pentagon Keep Anthropic on Its Blacklist
The conflict began in February, when President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused Anthropic of threatening national security and moved to designate the AI lab a supply-chain risk. The dispute centred on the Pentagon’s demand to use Claude for “all lawful uses,” while chief executive Dario Amodei held to safeguards barring fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance.
That standoff carried practical consequences: the designation enabled the Defense Department to remove Claude from its systems and prohibit Anthropic products from Defense work. Anthropic argued that officials were effectively punishing it for refusing to loosen protections it believed could facilitate mass surveillance or autonomous armed drones.
On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 for the Pentagon, rejecting Anthropic’s challenge. The majority accepted the department’s core fear: that Anthropic could alter Claude’s design so it would not carry out national-security functions the Pentagon considered both contractually allowed and necessary. Judge Gregory G. Katsas wrote that the department “reasonably feared” precisely that outcome.
The decision is not a clean sweep for the government. A separate federal judge in California ruled this summer that the Pentagon had acted illegally in a parallel effort to punish Anthropic over its criticism of the military’s approach to AI use. The Washington case turned on a different supply-chain-risk authority, leaving the two rulings in tension rather than outright conflict.
Anthropic said it “respectfully disagrees” and stressed that the other court had already found the parallel designation unlawful. The company said it was considering further review, keeping the fight over who sets the limits on military AI far from finished.
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