Anthropic filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense and other agencies on Monday arguing that the Trump administration’s directive for the federal government to stop using the company’s artificial intelligence was unlawful.
The administration ordered all federal agencies to stop using the company’s AI platform, Claude, over Anthropic’s refusal to allow the Pentagon unfettered use of its program. Anthropic’s policy includes restrictions on using the tools for lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans, according to the company’s court filings.
Defense Department Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed Anthropic as a “supply chain risk,” which the Pentagon formalized last week.
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The company argued in its lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, that being dropped by the administration is “harming Anthropic irreparably” and has led to “unrecoverable revenue losses.” The administration’s directive for the federal government to stop using Anthropic’s software was meant to “punish” the company for sticking to its principles on safe AI use, Anthropic argued in court filings.
“The federal government retaliated against a leading frontier AI developer for adhering to its protected viewpoint on a subject of great public significance—AI safety and the limitations of its own AI models—in violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States,” the company’s court filings said.
The U.S. military reportedly used Anthropic’s AI to plan strikes on Iran last month, even after top Trump administration officials ordered the federal government to stop using the company’s software.
Anthropic said in its lawsuit that the “supply chain risk” designation is unprecedented and has never been applied to other domestic companies. The company said it has caused confusion within government agencies and the company’s outside partners — including cloud providers and investors — about how they are allowed to use the company’s software.
“Until the Department raised this threat, no government official had ever raised a concern with Anthropic about potential supply chain vulnerabilities,” Anthropic said in court documents, adding that a letter that Anthropic received from the federal government about the supply-chain risk designation “did not explain what risk Anthropic’s services supposedly pose to national security.”
The Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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