Appeals Court Upholds Pentagon's Anthropic Risk Label — SkimNews
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- A federal appeals court in DC ruled 2-1 on Friday against Anthropic, upholding one of the Pentagon's supply-chain risk designations that bars Claude from military and federal systems.
- The majority said the department had 'ample support' to deem continued integration of Claude into defense information systems a 'statutorily covered national-security risk,' citing Anthropic's own restrictions encoded into the model.
- Anthropic is weighing all options, including a broader DC Circuit rehearing or a US Supreme Court appeal, according to spokesperson Danielle Cohen, who said the company remains confident.
- The ruling leaves the Pentagon's blocking in place even as a San Francisco federal judge separately tossed out a different supply-chain risk label in March and confirmed that decision last month — both cases face years of appeals.
- The judges rejected Anthropic's due-process and free-speech claims, framing the dispute as 'standard contract negotiations' over a term the department deemed essential rather than punishment for Anthropic's regulatory views.
- Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had deemed Anthropic's refusal to allow its current models to support autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance a significant national security risk.
- The Pentagon is replacing Claude with SpaceX's Grok, Google's Gemini, and OpenAI's GPT models, though some Google and OpenAI employees have publicly objected to those deals on ethical grounds.
Why it matters: The 2-1 ruling locks the Pentagon's block on Claude in place indefinitely, just as Anthropic moves toward an expected IPO later this year, meaning the company will carry a confirmed military ban into any public-market pricing. Defense AI work now flows to Grok, Gemini, and GPT — even after internal protests at Google and OpenAI — concentrating Pentagon leverage over which labs shape its AI stack.
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