A federal judge has vacated the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a national security supply chain risk, finding that the label was punishment for the company’s public criticism of the Trump administration rather than a security judgment.
US District Judge Rita Lin of the Northern District of California issued the 59-page order on Thursday, holding that the government violated Anthropic’s First Amendment rights and the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. “The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,” she wrote. The order vacates the designation and bars the administration from enforcing the measures Anthropic challenged.
The dispute began on February 27, when President Trump instructed agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the company a supply chain risk the same day. What Anthropic had declined to do was drop two restrictions in its contract terms: no mass surveillance of Americans, and no fully autonomous weapons. Google agreed in April to broadly the terms Anthropic would not accept. Anthropic sued in March and won a preliminary injunction that month, after which the Pentagon’s chief technology officer said publicly that the ban stood anyway.
Lin found no “articulable basis” for the claim that Anthropic might sabotage its own models, and said the government never showed the company could alter them once they were deployed on national security systems. “An IT vendor does not become a potential adversary of the United States whenever it asks probing questions or stubbornly insists on particular contracting terms,” she wrote.
The procedural findings are as damaging as the constitutional ones. Hegseth ordered the designation publicly before the analysis supporting it was finished, and the department assembled the factual record afterward, which Lin said suggested it had been built “after the fact to justify the foreordained conclusion.” The Pentagon also failed to weigh less restrictive alternatives and did not give congressional committees the explanation federal law requires. She called the designation arbitrary and capricious.
The government’s own behavior undercut its case. A day after the designation, Pentagon under secretary Emil Michael told Anthropic the two sides were “very close” to a deal, and the White House later discussed using Anthropic’s Mythos model in sensitive settings. “None of that is consistent with a genuine fear that Anthropic is a saboteur who would poison its software to harm national security,” Lin wrote. The NSA, part of the same department, had authorized access to Mythos Preview in April to scan its own systems for vulnerabilities.
Anthropic was the first US company publicly designated a supply chain risk under the statute, which exists to protect military systems from threats including sabotage. Lin found that a contract dispute and public criticism do not meet its definition.
The ruling does not require the Pentagon to buy anything. Government lawyers said last month that the removal of Anthropic’s technology from military systems had continued throughout the litigation and would be finished by the end of September. The administration is expected to appeal. A separate Anthropic challenge to a related designation covering civilian contracts is pending before the DC Circuit, which declined to grant emergency relief in April.
“We welcome the court’s ruling that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful,” an Anthropic spokesperson said. “We remain focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology.” The Pentagon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Sources: NOTUS, The Next Web
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team