A federal judge has struck down the Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic, ruling that the government illegally retaliated against the AI company and ordering officials to rescind directives targeting its technology. Judge Rita Lin, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, issued the order this week vacating the government’s actions against the maker of Claude AI.
According to the ruling, the government designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk to national security after the company refused to lift restrictions barring the use of its products for lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans. Lin found that the move violated the company’s constitutional rights.
“The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment,” Lin wrote, granting key portions of Anthropic’s motion for summary judgment.
Sweeping Bans on Federal Agencies and Contractors Vacated
The judge noted that President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “ordered all federal agencies to permanently stop using Anthropic’s products, and banned all defense contractors from doing any business with Anthropic, even if unrelated to the military.” Lin vacated those measures and directed the administration to withdraw the directives she deemed unlawful.
While acknowledging that the Department of Defense may select the AI vendor of its choice, Lin found the restrictions placed on Anthropic to be “illegal and baseless.” She wrote that “the empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics.”
The administration offered only a “slim” justification, according to the ruling. Lin wrote that federal defendants “have now backed away from the thrust of their risk assessment,” which had relied on claims that Anthropic maintained backdoor access to its technology once deployed in national security systems. The judge stated it was “now clear that Anthropic undisputedly lacks any such access” and that the company’s technology “is itself no riskier to the national security than any other ‘black box’ artificial intelligence model.”
Origins of the Lawsuit and Ongoing Appeal
Anthropic sued the administration in March, arguing that the government blacklisted the firm in retaliation after it declined to allow Claude AI models to be used for autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans. The company asserted that the First Amendment protects “the right to express its views—both publicly and to the government—about the limitations of its own AI services and important issues of AI safety,” and that the supply-chain risk designation failed to follow procedures mandated by Congress.
The White House responded to the lawsuit by stating that “President Trump will never allow a radical left, woke company to jeopardize our national security by dictating how the greatest and most powerful military in the world operates.”
The dispute has moved through two courts. The administration initially secured a favorable ruling from judges in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which denied Anthropic’s emergency motion for a stay. That appeals court later held oral arguments and continues to review the case.
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Image: arstechnica.com
