<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A federal appeals court in the District of Columbia upheld the Pentagon’s effective blacklisting of Anthropic in a 2-1 decision on Friday.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The ruling is part of an ongoing dispute between the Department of Defense, which listed Anthropic as a supply chain risk in March, and the artificial intelligence company that operates the Claude platform.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“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,” Judge Gregory Katsas wrote in the majority opinion for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which Judge Neomi Rao joined.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Katsas and Rao were nominated by President Donald Trump. Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, who was nominated by former President George H.W. Bush, dissented.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“We respectfully disagree with the court’s decision,” an Anthropic spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “Another federal court has already held the government’s parallel designation unlawful. We remain confident in our position and are considering all options, including further review.”</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The supply-chain-risk designation is typically reserved for foreign companies and aims to exclude companies from participating in defense contracts or supplying components for sensitive military systems if they have ties to foreign or potentially adversarial entities.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Anthropic filed two lawsuits to challenge the designation, one in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and another in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, as the Pentagon relied on two distinct designations to justify its overall decision. A judge in San Francisco ruled last month that one designation was illegal, while the D.C. appeals court ruling upheld the other on Friday.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The dispute arose because Anthropic did not want Claude to be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, which department officials stated they did not intend to use it for. However, the Pentagon also maintains that private companies cannot have the final say over how their programs are utilized.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In the Pentagon, Emil Michael, the undersecretary of war for research and development, was one of the most vocal officials regarding Anthropic.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“The hammer of justice has smashed [Anthropic] arguments,” Michael said in response to the court’s ruling on Friday. “They are a Supply Chain Risk to the defense industrial base serving the [War Department]. Warfighters will sleep better knowing that no private company will insert their opinions in the chain of command. [War Secretary Pete Hegseth] was right!”</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The Trump administration, including the president, has criticized Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who recently authored an essay calling for more regulations on AI, titled “We must pace the frontier.” Amodei cautioned that industry leaders should “slow down” technological advancement, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk both supported his comments. Amodei expressed concerns that unchecked AI’s “recursive self-improvement” could lead to a situation where AI surpasses humans’ ability to control and monitor the systems it creates.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Trump wrote Monday in a post on Truth Social that his administration “has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ – and we will continue to do so!”</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing military operations, both in combat and in routine tasks. One primary application of AI in the military is the analysis of intelligence gathered from various sources, synthesizing it in a fraction of the time it would take a human to do the same.</p>