Anthropic and Pentagon face off in court over ban on company’s AI model

Anthropic faced against the Department of Defense in a federal court on Tuesday afternoon, as the artificial intelligence company seeks a temporary pause on the government’s decision to bar the US military and any contractors from using its technology. The two sides have been locked in an escalating feud over Anthropic’s refusal to allow its Claude AI chatbot to be used for domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous lethal weapons. Donald Trump has ordered all US government agencies to stop using Anthropic’s tools, which the company is also contesting.
Representatives for the AI firm and the government appeared in a northern California district court, where Judge Rita Lin presided over the hearing for a temporary injunction. The hearing is one of the first steps in Anthropic’s lawsuit against the defense department, which it filed earlier this month after Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, declared the company a supply chain risk – a designation that Anthropic alleges will cause irreparable harm and cost hundreds of millions or more in revenue.
Anthropic’s suit and Lin’s decision will have widespread ramifications for both the company and the US government, which has come to extensively rely on Claude over the past year for a variety of uses, including in its military operations against Iran. The standoff between the defense department and Anthropic, especially the former’s move to categorize a US company as a supply chain risk for the first time ever, has also created significant tension in Silicon Valley’s close relationship with the Trump administration.
Lin opened the hearing with her thoughts on the case, calling it a “fascinating public policy debate” while saying that her role was to narrowly decide whether the government’s actions were illegal. Lin also said she had questions about the government’s actions, which appeared to go beyond a decision simply not to work with Anthropic and veer into punitive measures.
“It looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic,” Lin said.
Lawyers for the government argued that Hegseth’s social media post last month declaring that no contractors could do business with the government was not a legal action and no entity would face noncompliance issues if they ignored it. The government’s argument seemed to conflict with Hegseth’s post on X that any contractor that does business with the military is prohibited from working with Anthropic.
“You’re standing here saying, ‘We said it, but we didn’t really mean it,’” Lin pressed the government’s lawyer on their claim. Lin later asked why Hegseth would post the claim if it had no legal effect.
“I don’t know,” the government’s lawyer replied.
Anthropic declined to comment on the lawsuit. The defense department has previously stated that as a matter of policy it does not comment on litigation.
Anthropic alleges that the government violated the company’s first amendment rights by designating it a supply chain risk, arguing that the decision was an attempt at punishing the company for displeasing the president and for not complying with the defense department’s request to loosen safety guardrails on Claude.
“These actions are unprecedented and unlawful. The constitution does not allow the government to wield its enormous power to punish a company for its protected speech,” Anthropic stated in its California suit.
Anthropic has argued that its AI model is not reliable enough to be used for the purposes of mass domestic surveillance or fully automated lethal weapons, while its CEO, Dario Amodei, has expressed concerns about AI being used in authoritarian ways. US defense officials and Trump have meanwhile framed the company’s actions as a politically biased betrayal of the country, with Trump calling it a “A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY” in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Despite the defense department striking deals in recent weeks with rival firms OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI to allow them to operate in a classified environment, disentangling federal agencies from their use of Claude is an enormous undertaking that would take months of disruption to complete. The company’s technology is deeply intertwined with government operations, including in the military, where it is reportedly being used to select and analyze targets of missile strikes in Iran.