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Anthropic’s Lawsuit Should Absolutely Destroy the Pentagon in Court

But make no mistake: The company is not one of the good guys.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger and Head of Communications Sasha de Marigny give a press conference on May 22, 2025.

Anthropic, makers of the “Claude” AI model, has sued the Department of Defense in two separate lawsuits, including one alleging that the government is violating its First Amendment rights. The conflict arose last week when the Trump administration labeled the company a “supply chain risk” and banned government agencies, or any entity working with the US military, from using the Claude system. The Trump administration now calls Claude a national security risk. (The second lawsuit takes issue with this designation, which, until now, has never been used against a US company.)

The blacklisting followed months of fighting between Anthropic and the government. Anthropic wants to keep “safeguards” on Claude that prevent the system from being used to power autonomous weapons—basically, killing machines that can conduct military operations without human involvement—and to engage in widespread surveillance of Americans. The Trump administration wants the company to loosen those safeguards. Evidently, Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth wants the killer robots now, and he doesn’t like Anthropic getting in his way.

The government repeatedly threatened Anthropic with consequences if it didn’t remove its safety restrictions. It would appear the supply chain risk designation and associated blacklisting are those consequences.

All of this should make the Anthropic lawsuit a slam dunk, at least the First Amendment part, assuming there are still judges and justices willing to hold the Trump administration accountable to the Constitution, even in the realm of national security. Anthropic’s complaint makes a pretty clear cut case for a First Amendment violation (I’m less knowledgeable about the other claim, though my assumption, based on prior history, is that the Trump administration is indeed in violation of every law it’s accused of violating).

The simple facts are these: The government wanted Anthropic to make its AI do something. Anthropic didn’t want to make its AI do it, because of its beliefs, and those beliefs are protected under the First Amendment. The government punished Anthropic with an adverse national security designation, because the company wouldn’t do what the government wanted. That is a free speech violation.

It would have been one thing if the government simply decided to use another AI provider or, heaven forbid, stopped using AI for military purposes. That wouldn’t violate the First Amendment; it would simply be the government opting to use a different service. But the government didn’t merely take its business elsewhere—it decided to punish Anthropic by declaring it a national security threat.

As happens so often, Donald Trump’s chronic inability to keep his mouth shut even when he is violating the Constitution should help make Anthropic’s case for it. On social media, he called Anthropic “out-of-control” and a “RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY” of “Leftwing nut jobs.” He’s not saying that the company is no longer able to provide a useful service to the government; he’s saying the government is blacklisting the company for its political views.

Hegseth doubled down on these comments. According to the complaint, when Hegseth issued the blacklist order, he “denounced what he characterized as Anthropic’s ‘Silicon Valley ideology,’ ‘defective altruism,’ ‘corporate........

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