{"id":874429,"date":"2026-08-28T10:22:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T10:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/874429\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T10:22:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T10:22:09","slug":"pentagons-blacklisting-of-anthropic-was-unlawful-us-judge-rules-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/874429\/","title":{"rendered":"Pentagon\u2019s blacklisting of Anthropic was unlawful, US judge rules | Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

A US federal judge ruled Thursday that sanctions imposed in February by the Trump administration against AI giant Anthropic<\/a> were illegal, finding that the government had punished the artificial intelligence company for publicly criticising the Pentagon.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,\u201d Judge Rita Lin said in a 59-page decision.<\/p>\n

She barred the federal agencies named in the lawsuit from enforcing President Donald Trump\u2019s order to stop using the tools of Anthropic \u2013 creator of the Claude AI models \u2013 and overturned defense secretary Pete Hegseth\u2019s designation of the company as a \u201csupply chain risk\u201d, a status previously reserved for foreign firms.<\/p>\n

The ruling makes permanent the temporary suspension of sanctions ordered by the judge in March and takes effect immediately. The government may appeal.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe welcome the court\u2019s ruling that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful,\u201d an Anthropic spokesperson said.<\/p>\n

Hegseth\u2019s unprecedented move, which followed Anthropic\u2019s refusal<\/a> to allow the military to \u2060use AI chatbot Claude for US surveillance or autonomous weapons, blocked Anthropic from certain military contracts. Anthropic executives \u200bhave said it could cost the company billions \u200cof dollars in lost business \u200cand reputational harm.<\/p>\n

Trump had lashed out at the company after its refusal, describing it in a February social media post as \u201ca radical left, woke company\u201d and \u201cout-of-control\u201d.<\/p>\n

Anthropic says that AI models are not reliable enough to be safely used in autonomous weapons \u200cand that it opposes domestic surveillance as a violation of rights, but the Pentagon says private companies should not be able to constrain military action.<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s designation was the first time a US company has been publicly designated a supply-chain risk under an obscure government-procurement statute aimed at protecting military systems \u200bfrom foreign sabotage.<\/p>\n

Judge Lin, an appointee of Joe Biden, described the Pentagon\u2019s designation as \u201cillegal and baseless\u201d.<\/p>\n

In its 9 March lawsuit<\/a>, Anthropic alleged the government violated its right to free speech under the first amendment of the constitution by retaliating against its views on AI safety. The company said it was not given a chance to dispute the designation, in violation of its fifth amendment right to due process.<\/p>\n

The \u2060lawsuit says the decision was unlawful, unsupported by facts and inconsistent with the \u200bmilitary\u2019s past praise of Claude.<\/p>\n

The justice \u200bdepartment countered that Anthropic\u2019s refusal to lift \u200bthe restrictions could cause uncertainty in the Pentagon over how it could use \u200bClaude and risk disabling \u200cmilitary systems during operations, \u200baccording to a court \u200bfiling.<\/p>\n

The government said the designation stemmed from Anthropic\u2019s refusal to accept contractual terms, not its views on AI safety.<\/p>\n

Anthropic has a second lawsuit pending in Washington DC, over a separate Pentagon supply-chain risk designation that could lead to its exclusion from civilian government contracts.<\/p>\n

With Reuters and Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A US federal judge ruled Thursday that sanctions imposed in February by the Trump administration against AI giant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":874430,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-874429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=874429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/874430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=874429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=874429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=874429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}