Judge rules Trump admin’s Anthropic ban illegal

A federal judge in California struck down the Trump administration's ban on the military's use of Anthropic's AI, ruling that President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth retaliated against the company for refusing to let its Claude chatbot be used for lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin found the government's stated national-security justification collapsed under scrutiny, since officials later admitted Anthropic has no backdoor access to its own deployed models.

The dispute began after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly said the company would not hand over that kind of access, prompting Trump to order agencies to drop Anthropic's technology and call it 'leftwing nut jobs' on Truth Social. Hegseth followed with a formal 'supply chain risk' designation the same day. Judge Lin noted that Pentagon officials kept negotiating contract terms with Amodei even after the ban took effect, and that agencies including the NSA kept working with Anthropic's newer model throughout.

Lin ruled the ban violated Anthropic's First Amendment and due process rights and voided Hegseth's designation for exceeding his statutory authority, though she rejected claims that the episode was part of a broader unconstitutional power grab. The ruling permanently blocks enforcement but does not require the Pentagon to keep using Anthropic's products. Anthropic told the court the affair scared off more than 100 customers and threatened billions in revenue regardless of the outcome.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.