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Appeals Court Upholds Pentagon's Exclusion of Anthropic's Claude AI
Confirmed
In Short: A federal appeals court has upheld the Pentagon's decision to exclude Anthropic's AI model Claude from its supply chain, citing national security risks.
The Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld the Department of War's decision to remove Anthropic AI product Claude from its supply chain, affirming the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's initial order under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018.
The court ruled 2-1 that the Pentagon lawfully labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, noting that the Department had ample support for its conclusion that Claude's continued integration into the Department's information systems presented a statutorily covered national-security risk.
In its opinion, the court emphasized that in a Republic, it is the President and the Secretary of War who must determine how best to balance the competing risks.
Anthropic had argued that the exclusion was arbitrary, not allowed by the law, and unconstitutional. However, the court found that the Pentagon had acted over a contract term it saw as essential.
The Pentagon had labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk in March, and Anthropic had sued the government days later. The case ran in two courts due to two separate designations.
The label bars the military and its contractors from using Anthropic’s Claude models, and the court’s decision is based on a per curiam judgment in Anthropic PBC v. United States Department of War.
According to the opinion’s recitation of the record, Anthropic layers three kinds of restrictions on Claude: safety training embedded in the model itself, technical monitoring measures, and contractual usage-policy prohibitions.
The Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018 authorizes covered procurement actions, such as barring agency contracts with a particular supplier, once an agency head determines in writing that the action is necessary to protect national security by reducing supply chain risk.
Circuit Judge Katsas wrote the 43-page opinion for the court, and Circuit Judge Henderson filed an eight-page dissent.
The determination rested on a recommendation from senior officials, built on a memorandum from Emil Michael, the Under Secretary for Research and Engineering, who cited Anthropic’s refusal to permit all lawful uses of Claude, its ability to alter system guardrails and model weights, and its questioning of the Department’s use of Claude in a sensitive military mission abroad.
Background
A federal appeals court on Monday ruled that Missouri must use its Republican-favored 2025 redistricting map in November, despite the Supreme Court declining twice this month to intervene in the dispute.
A federal appeals court has reinstated a Republican-backed redistricting map for Missouri's November elections, despite previous rejections by the Supreme Court.
What's confirmed
- "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," the court wrote.
- Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld the Department of War's decision to remove Anthropic AI product Claude from its supply chain.
What's still developing
- Anthropic builds restrictions into Claude that stop it from doing tasks the company wants to prevent, the court noted.
- Anthropic had also received prompt notice and a fair chance to contest the exclusion, they found.
- “Another federal court has already held the government’s parallel designation unlawful,” the Anthropic spokesperson said.
- The statute defines supply chain risk as the risk that any person may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, extract data, or otherwise manipulate covered information-technology products so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise manipulate those products or the information they store or transmit.