Trump administration throws toys out of the pram after court rules its ‘woke’ Anthropic blacklist illegal

The Trump administration’s attempt to punish AI company Anthropic after it refused to allow its technology to be used for autonomous warfare and mass surveillance has been ruled illegal by a federal judge, exposing the administration’s claim that the company posed a national security threat as little more than retaliation against a critic.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, was blacklisted by the Trump administration after a dispute over how its technology could be used by the US government and military. The company had refused to remove restrictions on the use of its AI models for lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of Americans.

Rather than accept those limits, the Trump administration responded by taking sweeping measures against the company.

In March, Anthropic sued the administration, arguing that it had been designated a national security supply-chain risk in retaliation for exercising its First Amendment rights. The company said it had the right to express its views to both the public and the government about how its AI services should be used and about AI safety.

It also argued that the government had failed to follow procedures set out by Congress when designating it a supply-chain risk.

The court has now sided with Anthropic, finding that the government illegally retaliated against the company by designating it a supply-chain risk to national security.

The ruling vacated the government’s actions and ordered the administration to rescind its directives against Anthropic.

Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered federal agencies to permanently stop using Anthropic’s products and barred defence contractors from doing business with the company, including business unrelated to military work.

Judge Rita Lin rejected the administration’s justification for those actions.

“Though the Department of War is undisputedly free to select the AI vendor of its choice, the evidence demonstrates that the broad measures imposed on Anthropic were illegal and baseless,” Lin wrote. “The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics.”

For an administration that has repeatedly presented political disagreement as a threat to national security while portraying its opponents as part of some amorphous “radical left,” the White House’s response to Anthropic’s lawsuit was as predictable as they come.

“President Trump will never allow a radical left, woke company to jeopardise our national security by dictating how the greatest and most powerful military in the world operates,” it said.

And for all the Trump administration’s talk of fighting “woke” corporations, the episode raises the question: who, exactly, is being ideological when a government responds to a company’s concerns about the use of its technology by attempting to destroy its access to government business?

On the evidence of this ruling, it was not Anthropic that overstepped the line.