alt.hn

3/9/2026 at 3:25:40 PM

Anthropic sues to block Pentagon blacklisting over AI use restrictions

 https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-sues-block-pentagon-blacklisting-over-ai-use-restrictions-2026-03-09/

by spenvo

3/9/2026 at 3:50:34 PM

I think the big problem is that this is more like a sanction, more than the government saying they don't want to do business with them. They government is saying that anyone they do business with can't do business with Anthropic.

So it's extremely important that they get an injunction that allows the cloud compute companies to continue to work them. I think they probably will, but it's really crazy that the government is actively trying to kill them off over this.

by astrashe2

3/9/2026 at 5:12:34 PM

The big problem is this is prior restraint on free speech.

by tantalor

3/9/2026 at 11:46:03 PM

I support the rights of Democrat & Republican administrations to designate certain companies as supply chain risks OR a national security risk.

I do not want a TikTok hoovering up our personal info sending it to China

I do not want a Anthropic becoming essential to warfare then questioning when the their AI is used to bring an enemy to justice

I do not want Nvidia sending their latest and greatest to China

I do not want a ASML moving their super advanced photolithography machines to China

I do not want a DJI selling their drones in the US and then exporting all the meta-data back to China

I do not want a Huawei hacking through American IT companies and then getting a free pass on selling their devices based on stolen IP in the US

by OrvalWintermute

3/9/2026 at 5:21:25 PM

> They government is saying that anyone they do business with can't do business with Anthropic.

Is neither unusual nor extraordinary. The 2022 TikTok ban on government devices—enacted under the Biden administration—carried the same viral-as-in-GPL terms.

by tokyobreakfast

3/9/2026 at 10:27:39 PM

The TikTok ban upheld by the courts was a law enacted by Congress, not an executive action, specifically targeting Tiktok. The legal challenges were all about the law's constitutionality.

This dispute challenges the executive's action, not the underlying law (10 USC 3252). Anthropic does make some constitutional claims regarding the 1st and 5th amendments, but they also advance procedural challenges under the Administrative Procedures Act and statutory arguments about whether the law authorized the action.

by curt15

3/9/2026 at 6:47:31 PM

At least TikTok is owned by China, which is the US’s rival. Nothing Anthropic has done gives me the impression they’re working against anything America.

by armchairhacker

3/9/2026 at 6:56:09 PM

This argument is going to be skewered in court.

by catigula

3/9/2026 at 6:12:20 PM

Careful, you might hurt yourself stretching that far

by scuff3d

3/9/2026 at 5:29:05 PM

The actual letter the govt sent Anthropic narrowed the supply chain risk to DoD usage. Far less than the Epstein administration poffered on social media

by verdverm

3/9/2026 at 3:53:37 PM

It’s not just the supply chain risk designation from the Department of defense. Trump then added that he would order all government agencies to stop doing business with them. Basically, if you do not cave to their ideology, you will be coerced through such unethical means.

by SilverElfin

3/9/2026 at 11:47:59 PM

Not placing ethical judgment: Why would Anthropic care about the designation? They want the money from government contracts? Does the designation keep them from any non-governmental income sources of significant size?

by jzhu_yc

3/9/2026 at 5:16:32 PM

Palantir famously sued the army and won, now accounting for the majority of their USG revenue. So, this is not necessarily a bad strategy.

Key differentiator though is Palantir’s suit was based primarily on Congressional acts and explicit clauses of the FAR. This absolutely does not seem to be the case for Anthropic, who could easily do the same, but chooses another ideological battle. I can’t imagine their legal counsel would recommend this route (actually asking Claude it doesn’t either!) which would imply this is Anthropic leadership’s move.

I’d gamble they’ve already given up on actual business with the government/military and that this is more of a PR move to further distance themselves and maintain a high road image.

by cuuupid

3/9/2026 at 11:53:07 PM

Palantir was trying to do the right thing.

Anthropic is trying to sell to the government while simultaneously dictating terms on how AI is used in the war department.

When you sell to the War department, or the IC, you can be certain that they are going to use it for planning operations and for executing operations.

by OrvalWintermute

3/9/2026 at 9:01:14 PM

The political framing is interesting, but there is an architecture problem underneath it.

Today, AI deployment authority exists in bilateral agreements: company acceptable use policies on one side, government procurement and designation on the other. When those disagree, the only enforcement mechanisms are legal (lawsuits) and administrative (blacklisting). Both are slow, blunt, and adversarial.

The structural gap: there is no shared enforcement layer. No standardized way for a deployer to say "this model is authorized for these use-cases, with these constraints, and here is the auditable proof." And no standardized way for a regulator to say "these constraints are required for this deployment context" in a machine-verifiable format.

What that would look like: per-deployment authority grants that specify permitted capabilities, usage constraints, and audit requirements. The deployer commits to enforceable boundaries. The regulator verifies compliance against those boundaries, not against a company policy document.

The Palantir comparison is apt but incomplete. Palantir sued over procurement process. This dispute is about something more fundamental: who has authority over what an AI system is allowed to do once deployed, and how that authority is enforced structurally rather than contractually.

Every bilateral AI governance dispute will follow this same pattern until there is an infrastructure layer that makes deployment authority explicit, verifiable, and enforceable by both sides.

by rodchalski

3/9/2026 at 4:19:01 PM

While it's difficult to eschew all government money, given the current political climate it would be interesting to turn the tables so to speak: updating their ToS to disallow any use by the federal government

This would hand the federal govt to OpenAI and Google but would certainly be head-turning. Hard to say if it would pay off positively for them though.

by ticulatedspline

3/9/2026 at 5:33:30 PM

AWS Bedrock offers Claude models in GovCloud so I don't think AWS would be very happy

by nijave

3/9/2026 at 4:50:30 PM

The government has near-absolute discretion over whom it contracts with, and no company has a constitutional right to be a federal vendor. Courts treat military technology decisions as core Commander-in-Chief functions subject to minimal judicial review, and the political question doctrine may bar second-guessing what the Secretary deems a security risk.

The supply chain risk statute grants broad, largely unreviewable national security discretion and doesn't require the threat to originate from a foreign adversary.

Finally, the First Amendment claim faces the problem that the government was responding not to abstract speech but to a concrete refusal to provide services on the military's terms, which courts are unlikely to treat as protected expression warranting judicial override of procurement choices.

by tiahura

3/9/2026 at 5:24:46 PM

While this suit has a weak basis, what you’re saying is not at all how government contracting and procurement works.

> The government has near-absolute discretion over whom it contracts with,

Not at all the case, procurement is dictated by a maze of Congressional acts and the FAR.

> and no company has a constitutional right to be a federal vendor.

Not constitutional but federal law actually dictates they do. Many companies actually have _more_ of a right to contracts than primes.

> Courts treat military technology decisions as core Commander-in-Chief functions subject to minimal judicial review,

Not at all the case there have been many disputes and it’s not uncommon to see a protest filed against procurement decisions in even innocuous cases. Many companies (eg Palantir) have sued the government on procurement and won.

> and the political question doctrine may bar second-guessing what the Secretary deems a security risk.

Sure, lowercase security risk, but uppercase Supply Chain Risk designation is an actual action subject to administrative procedure. There are many laws (eg Administrative Procedure Act) that allow judges to overturn this. The current basis of their suit is largely ideological but if they instead argued the designation was arbitrary the APA could very possibly be used to overturn it.

by cuuupid

3/9/2026 at 10:38:53 PM

>The current basis of their suit is largely ideological but if they instead argued the designation was arbitrary the APA could very possibly be used to overturn it.

Their front-line complaint (Count 1 in the brief linked elsewhere in this thread) invokes the APA.

by curt15

3/9/2026 at 5:18:10 PM

Re: First Amendment claim

It goes much further than the "refusal to provide services" speech. By blacklisting them, they are blocked from doing any future business, which is prior restraint. Courts aren't very friendly to that.

by tantalor

3/9/2026 at 5:29:28 PM

Even if a law provides few guardrails to restrict how it's applied, courts care that applications of the law are not capricious.

by vharuck

3/9/2026 at 4:06:50 PM

A pointless publicity stunt because of state secrets privilege that will lead to more extreme actions from the Trump admin against Anthropic like the DoJ pulling the trigger on a selectively prosecuted company ending copyright/hacking case for stealing all their training material.

by int32_64

3/9/2026 at 5:15:32 PM

Defending against authoritarianism is never pointless.

by toomuchtodo

3/9/2026 at 6:39:02 PM

I've found it surprising how pro-Anthropic everyone here has been in this saga.

I assume it's for political reasons because they dislike the current US administration, as all of the government's claims that I've seen have been completely reasonable, and their actions justified.

Resist everything the Trump government does, whether it's good, bad, reasonable, or indifferent, is just a viewpoint that I find shortsighted.

by CSMastermind

3/9/2026 at 6:44:58 PM

Anthropic as a whole isn’t perfect, but in this specific scenario they seem to be.

Or, when Anthropic re-iterates “no murder without human approval, no domestic mass surveillance”, why should the government not only change suppliers (free-market), but label Anthropic a “supply-chain risk”?

by armchairhacker

3/9/2026 at 7:09:58 PM

https://youtu.be/gzwRflcLPAA?si=H1IAFEYoj8qEibNg

If you listen to the government officials explain the situation:

All this began after the Maduro raid, when executives from Anthropic allegedly called an intermediary vendor, Palantir, seeking specifics of how their software was used. Because this is classified information, Palantir refused to disclose it, which led to Anthropic threatening to shut off service to Palantir. Palantir reported this to the pentagon who then contacted Anthropic directly.

Obviously, the military can’t have Palantir’s services suddenly stop working mid-operation because one of their suppliers objects to it. So they can’t risk having Claude anywhere in the supply chain.

Assuming the government isn't lying, then the designation is completely and entirely appropriate. You can substitute out any other vendor, and they'd receive the same treatment.

by CSMastermind

3/9/2026 at 10:11:33 PM

>All this began after the Maduro raid, when executives from Anthropic allegedly called an intermediary vendor, Palantir, seeking specifics of how their software was used....

Let's see if the govt includes these assertions in their reply brief since such a factual record would obviously help their case.

by curt15

3/9/2026 at 9:38:52 PM

Cancelling Anthropic's contract, and maybe even restricting Anthropic's use as a component to DoD certain contract work might be reasonable.

However, Anthropic's lawsuits are broader than that - partly because the government's actions were broader than that.

* Trump did post a "truth" ordering all Federal agencies to stop using Claude. Anthropic claims that many federal agencies did stop using Claude, and is suing saying that the order is not lawful.

* Hegseth then posted saying that no DoD contractor can work with Anthropic or use Claude at all. This is much broader order than the actual delivered letter which is much narrower - contractors can use Claude, but you can't use Claude as part of your solutions that you deliver to DoD. Anthropic is claiming damages from the difference between the first announcement, and the actual delivered scope, and is also claiming that the actual order did not follow procedures.

* Finally, Anthropic is claiming that the pattern of behaviour by the administration demonstrate that the administration is not simply trying to protect against supply chain risk, but is actively trying to harm Anthropic out of spite.

Frankly, you just have to read Trump's or Hegseth's posts to just get the vibes that this isn't just a technocratic calculation.

by icegreentea2

3/9/2026 at 7:32:45 PM

> Assuming the government isn't lying

Found your mistake.

by sjsdaiuasgdia

3/10/2026 at 12:00:06 AM

If you sell to the War Department, the CIA, the NSA, or ICE/Border Patrol, you know exactly how it is going to be used.

This after the fact naiveté by Anthropic is crazy.

Speaking as a patriot I’d be incredibly proud if my tool was used in a supporting role for one of the most perfect military operations ever executed.

This would likely be the Hallmark of my advertising for the near future.

Instead, we have anthropic going on a fishing expedition for information to claim a TOS violation and rightfully getting the boot! :)

by OrvalWintermute

3/9/2026 at 10:14:22 PM

Assuming the government isn't lying

Explain why I should give the benefit of the doubt to the Trump administration here.

Go on. Explain. Dis gon' be gud.

by CamperBob2

3/9/2026 at 3:29:47 PM

My trust in the judicial system in the USA is so eroded that I could easily be convinced that this is just a PR move and they don’t expect to win anything that goes against Trump‘s wishes.

by adrianN

3/9/2026 at 4:07:40 PM

The judicial system aside, it was a deliberate legislative choice (in many countries, with the US being among the most enthusiastic) to allow the executive to unilaterally designate arbitrary entities to be bad. Every system of this nature eventually gets turned against people you yourself consider good. I don’t get the surprise, frankly.

by mananaysiempre

3/9/2026 at 4:37:49 PM

For what it's worth, it seems like the actual law that would be involved (so the deliberate legislative choice) does not allow Hegseth to do what he says he wants to do: https://www.justsecurity.org/132851/anthropic-supply-chain-r...

So it's not just that there's be a transfer of power to the executive (there is), there's also straight up executive overreach.

by icegreentea2

3/9/2026 at 5:33:28 PM

tl;dr the Major Questions Doctrine is something SCOTUS has been using to decide of Congress has given wide latitude. For big questions, Congress needs to be explicit. They used this in the IEEPA and tariffs case to end the arbitrary levies. Tariffs were not mentioned and are a big issue. Similar story here with claiming broad interpretation on an important issue.

by verdverm

3/9/2026 at 4:32:03 PM

Yeah, back during Trump's first term I was hoping Congress would rein in executive power a bunch as he is prone to do stuff like this, didn't turn out that way unfortunately...

Now the main constraint on executive power seems to be due process and habeas corpus.

by UncleEntity

3/9/2026 at 6:17:01 PM

[dead]

by ClaudioAnthrop