The stakes within the case—how much the federal government can punish an organization for not playing ball—were apparent from the beginning. Anthropic drew plenty of senior supporters with unlikely bedfellows amongst them, including former authors of President Trump’s AI policy.
But Judge Rita Lin’s 43-page opinion suggests that what is actually a contract dispute never needed to succeed in such a frenzy. It did so because the federal government disregarded the existing process for a way such disputes are governed and fueled the hearth with social media posts from officials that might eventually contradict the positions it took in court. The Pentagon, in other words, wanted a culture war (on top of the particular war in Iran that began hours later).
The federal government used Anthropic’s Claude for much of 2025 without criticism, in keeping with court documents, while the corporate walked a branding tightrope as a safety-focused AI company that also won defense contracts. Defense employees accessing it through Palantir were required to just accept terms of a government-specific usage policy that Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan said “prohibited mass surveillance of Americans and lethal autonomous warfare” (Kaplan’s declaration to the court didn’t include details of the policy). Only when the federal government aimed to contract with Anthropic directly did the disagreements begin.
What drew the ire of the judge is that when these disagreements became public, they’d more to do with punishment than simply cutting ties with Anthropic. They usually had a pattern: Tweet first, lawyer later.
President Trump’s post on Truth Social on February 27 referenced “Leftwing nutjobs” at Anthropic and directed every federal agency to stop using the corporate’s AI. This was echoed soon after by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said he’d direct the Pentagon to label Anthropic a supply chain risk.
Doing so necessitates that the secretary take a particular set of actions, which the judge found Hegseth didn’t complete. Letters sent to congressional committees, for instance, said that less drastic steps were evaluated and deemed impossible, without providing any further details. The federal government also said the designation as a supply chain risk was needed because Anthropic could implement a “kill switch,” but its lawyers later had to confess it had no evidence of that, the judge wrote.
Hegseth’s post also stated that “No contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the US military may conduct any industrial activity with Anthropic.” But the federal government’s own lawyers admitted on Tuesday that the Secretary doesn’t have the ability to do this, and agreed with the judge that the statement had “absolutely no legal effect in any respect.”
The aggressive posts also led the judge to also conclude that Anthropic was on solid ground in complaining that its First Amendment rights were violated. The federal government, the judge wrote while citing the posts, “got down to publicly punish Anthropic for its ‘ideology’ and ‘rhetoric,’ in addition to its ‘arrogance’ for being unwilling to compromise those beliefs.”
