@rohanpaul_ai: A federal appeals court has handed the Trump administration a victory in its fight with Anthropic. In a new appeals cou…
Summary
A U.S. appeals court allowed the Pentagon to block Anthropic from military contracts due to national security risks, while a separate California ruling limits broader bans on the company.
View Cached Full Text
Cached at: 09/26/26, 10:59 AM
A federal appeals court has handed the Trump administration a victory in its fight with Anthropic.
In a new appeals court judgement A U.S. appeals court has allowed the Pentagon to continue blocking Anthropic from military contracts for now over its “national security risk” designation. handing a victory to the Trump Administration.
-
The D.C. Circuit said Claude’s built-in restrictions can qualify as a supply-chain risk because they blocked government-requested tasks and created uncertainty during an overseas military operation.
-
The majority did not rely on Anthropic retaining remote control after deployment, because the Pentagon had clarified that its designation did not rest on that premise.
-
Instead, its reasoning turns on whether Claude’s encoded safety rules can make the model refuse military tasks when the Pentagon considers reliability operationally critical.
-
The majority also accepted Anthropic’s AI-safety advocacy as protected speech, but said the exclusion flowed from rejected contract terms rather than retaliation for that advocacy.
-
But this is not a nationwide judgment that every federal agency can blacklist Anthropic. Judge Rita Lin’s separate California ruling struck down the broader §3252 designation and actions including the government-wide prohibition and the attempt to prevent defense contractors from doing unrelated business with Anthropic.
So, oddly, both judgments can exist at the same time because they concern different statutory powers. The D.C. Circuit itself stressed that §4713 has a substantially broader definition of “supply chain risk” than §3252 and expressly said it had “no quarrel” with the California court’s conclusion that Anthropic lacked the bad motive required under the narrower law.
Similar Articles
@VraserX: Anthropic won in court against the Pentagon. The Commerce Secretary then said Anthropic was back on the “right side.” T…
Anthropic won a court case against the Pentagon, but the Defense Department still considers it a supply-chain risk, underscoring how frontier AI labs are increasingly drawn into political and regulatory conflicts.
U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
A U.S. appeals court upheld the Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk, preventing the military from using their AI models due to national security concerns.
Anthropic gets its first court win over the Pentagon’s supply chain risk label
A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was illegal, violating the First and Fifth Amendments.
A Judge Has Blocked the Pentagon’s Attempt to Blacklist Anthropic
A federal judge blocked the Pentagon's attempt to designate Anthropic a national security risk, ruling the action unconstitutional and arbitrary. The decision lifts sanctions imposed by multiple agencies, though the Pentagon is not required to use Anthropic's AI models.
Anthropic was illegally blacklisted by the Trump administration, court rules
A court ruled that the Trump administration's blacklisting of Anthropic was unconstitutional and retaliatory, due to Anthropic's refusal to allow its AI for mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons.