A federal appeals court on Sept. 25 upheld the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, rejecting the artificial intelligence company’s claims that the label exceeded the law and punished protected speech.
The Department of War cut Anthropic off after the company declined to let the military use its Claude AI product without limits that the company wanted on autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. The Pentagon has said it does not intend to use Claude for those purposes.
The designation of the company, under that federal law designed to protect military systems from foreign sabotage, functions as a blacklist, preventing it from doing business with the federal government and its contractors. The federal boycott of Anthropic directed federal agencies, contractors, and suppliers to end ties with the company.
Government officials said no private company gets to set the rules for war.
Anthropic said the government was punishing it for speaking up, not stopping a genuine security threat.
Two courts went in different directions. A federal judge in San Francisco previously threw out one version of the ban in August, calling it unlawful retaliation.
“The department had ample support for its conclusion that the continued integration of Claude into the department’s information systems, by the department or its contractors, presented a statutorily covered national-security risk,” U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas wrote for the panel.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
