A judge has thrown out the Pentagon's 'supply chain risk' label on Anthropic — invoking national security, she wrote, is not a blank cheque to punish critics

On Thursday 27 August 2026 US District Judge Rita Lin, of the Northern District of California, set aside the Defense Department's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk and issued a permanent injunction barring the government from giving effect to it or to the directive ordering federal agencies to stop using Claude. Lin found the government had retaliated against Anthropic for criticising the administration's contracting position in public, in violation of the First Amendment, and had stripped the company of protected liberty interests without adequate notice or a meaningful chance to respond, in violation of the Fifth Amendment's due process clause. She wrote that 'the empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics'. The fight began over a roughly $200 million deployment of Claude on classified systems: Anthropic refused to drop two contractual restrictions — no fully autonomous lethal weapons, no domestic mass surveillance of Americans — talks collapsed in late February, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth applied the label. The same judge had blocked the measures temporarily on 26 March, saying then that nothing in the governing statute supports 'the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary'. Anthropic said it was pleased the court had found the designation unlawful; the government can still appeal.

✓ Verified · 4 sources

Related stories