Anthropic challenges US Pentagon’s ban in San Francisco court showdown

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Anthropic accuses Pentagon of unlawful retaliation over its refusal to loosen AI safety restrictions for military use.

Anthropic and the administration of United States President Donald Trump are headed to court over the US Defense Department’s decision last month to cut ties with the artificial intelligence giant after it refused to allow unrestricted military use of its Claude AI model.

The legal showdown begins Tuesday in San Francisco, where Anthropic will petition the court to halt a Pentagon-led ban enacted after the company refused to strip safety guardrails that prevent its artificial intelligence (AI) from being used for fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance.

Supply chain claims

On March 3, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic as a national security supply chain risk amid the company’s refusal to remove guardrails. The designation prohibits anyone within the Defense Department or its contractors from using the technology.

Anthropic’s 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 from foreign sabotage.

By March 9, the AI company filed a lawsuit, calling the administration’s move an “unprecedented and unlawful” designation and claiming it violated freedom of speech protections and due process rights that require the administration to follow a specific protocol when making a decision.

“AI-powered surveillance poses immense dangers to our democracy. Anthropic’s public advocacy for AI guardrails is laudable and protected by the First Amendment — not something the Pentagon should be punishing,” Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said in a release in response to the lawsuit.

Retaliation allegations

In a filing last week, the White House pushed back on Anthropic’s claims that government action violated free speech protections under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, saying the dispute stems from contract negotiations and national security concerns rather than retaliation.

“Anthropic is not likely to succeed on the merits. Anthropic is not likely to succeed in showing that the Presidential Directive, the Secretary’s social media post, and the Secretarial Determination were retaliation for Anthropic’s expressions about the safety of its model and the responsible use of AI,” the filing said.

“The record reflects that the President and the Secretary were motivated by concerns about Anthropic’s potential future conduct if it retained access to the Government’s IT infrastructure. Those concerns are unrelated to Anthropic’s speech, and no one has purported to restrict Anthropic’s expressive activity,” the filing noted.

However, legal experts and lawmakers have accused the White House of retaliation, including Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who on Monday penned a letter to Hegseth voicing her concerns.

“I am particularly concerned that DoD [the US Department of Defense] is trying to strong-arm American companies into providing the Department with the tools to spy on American citizens and deploy fully autonomous weapons without adequate safeguards,” she said.

Legal experts believe that Anthropic is likely to prevail, pointing to a February 27 post on X in which Hegseth said he is directing the DoD to “designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security”.

The post also said that contractors, suppliers or partners for the United States military are prohibited from “commercial activity with Anthropic”.

“That [the X post] went far beyond what the law allows him to say. He also said the Pentagon hadn’t done any of the things required before declaring a supply chain risk under the statute,” Charlie Bullock, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Law & AI, told Al Jazeera.

“That was clearly illegal, and now the government, in its filings, is admitting that and instead saying everyone should have ignored it and that the real supply chain designation came several days later.”

Judge Lin’s decision on the preliminary injunction will determine whether the administration can effectively ‘blacklist’ American firms that refuse to align with its military directives.

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