The Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal, a federal judge ruled in an order vacating government directives against the use of the firm’s AI technology. The government illegally retaliated against Anthropic by designating it a supply-chain risk to national security, said yesterday’s ruling by Judge Rita Lin in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The maker of Claude AI technology was barred by the US after it refused to drop restrictions on the use of its products for lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans, the ruling said.
As Lin noted, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “ordered all federal agencies to permanently stop using Anthropic’s products, and banned all defense contractors from doing any business with Anthropic, even if unrelated to the military.” Lin vacated those government actions and ordered the Trump administration to rescind the directives that she deemed illegal. The Trump administration provided only a “slim” justification to the court, Lin wrote, stating that the federal defendants “have now backed away from the thrust of their risk assessment, which relied on Anthropic having backdoor access to its technology once deployed in a national security system. It is now clear that Anthropic undisputedly lacks any such access and that, as Defendants concede, Anthropic’s technology is itself no riskier to the national security than any other ‘black box’ artificial intelligence model.”
Extract — continue reading at the source.
