Judge blocks Trump administration restrictions on Anthropic

A federal judge has permanently barred the Trump administration from enforcing rules that cut artificial intelligence company Anthropic off from federal work, ruling that officials unlawfully punished the maker of Claude for taking a public position on how its technology should be used by the military.

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin of San Francisco ruled late Thursday that the administration’s actions violated Anthropic’s First Amendment rights and due process protections. The measures included an order from President Trump directing federal agencies to stop using Claude and a designation by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk, a move aimed at preventing private defense contractors from using the company’s AI model for military work.

Lin called the government’s conduct “unlawful retaliation against Anthropic for constitutionally protected expressive activities.” In the ruling, she wrote that “the government is certainly owed deference on weighty issues of national security,” but said officials’ “contemporaneous words and deeds confirm that the challenged actions were based on a desire to make a public example out of Anthropic for its ‘arrogance’ in criticizing the government, not based on any articulable basis to believe that Anthropic would actually sabotage its model.”

The BBC reported that Lin also described the Defense Department’s supply chain risk designation as “illegal and baseless” and said citing national security “is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics.”

The ruling is a major victory for Anthropic in a monthslong legal fight over its efforts to place guardrails on Claude, a powerful AI model used by the military. Anthropic sought to prevent the model from being used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The military argued it should be allowed to use the model for all lawful purposes.

Anthropic’s lawsuit called the government’s actions “unprecedented and unlawful” and said its business had been harmed. The company also argued that Hegseth had exceeded his authority by designating it a supply chain risk under a law intended to protect military systems from foreign sabotage. According to the BBC, it was the first time an American company had been publicly designated in that way.

Anthropic said its models were not reliable enough to be safely used in weapons systems and said it opposed domestic surveillance as a rights violation. The Pentagon said at the time that private companies should not be able to constrain military action. The White House had previously called Anthropic “a radical left, woke company” attempting to control military activity and said the military was bound by the U.S. Constitution, “not any woke AI company’s terms of service.”

Lin had signaled concern earlier in the case, saying the government appeared to be trying to “cripple” the company and “chill public debate” over military use of AI. “This appears to be classic First Amendment retaliation,” she said then.

Anthropic welcomed the ruling. A company spokesperson told the BBC that Anthropic is focused on “working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology.”

Lin’s order does not require the government to use Anthropic or prevent officials from awarding business to another AI company, as long as those decisions comply with applicable regulations, statutes and constitutional provisions. The BBC said it had contacted the Pentagon and White House for comment.