A federal court in Washington refused on Friday to overturn the sidelining of the artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic by the Pentagon, which feared that its model Claude would refuse certain military missions, according to the decision consulted by AFP.
US military contractors therefore still cannot use Anthropic when they work for the Department of Defense, which designated this company as a “supply chain risk” in early March, a status previously reserved for foreign companies linked to hostile powers.
At the end of August, in a separate proceeding, a San Francisco judge overturned the Trump administration’s other sanctions against the AI giant, including the order given to all federal agencies to stop using Claude. The judge castigated an “empty invocation of national security” to “punish those who criticize the government”.
Anthropic opposed to mass surveillance
The conflict erupted in February, after Anthropic refused to let the military use Claude for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous lethal weapons. Like the Californian judge, the Washington Court recognizes that Anthropic acted without bad intention. But the law applied, resulting from the federal public procurement code, “concerns what Anthropic does, not why it does it,” writes Judge Gregory Katsas on behalf of the majority (two votes to one).
“In our Republic, it is up to the President and the Minister of Defense to determine how best to arbitrate between these risks,” he concludes. In a dissenting opinion, Judge Karen Henderson believes that any supplier will now be forced to choose whether to “accept the Minister’s demands or risk being designated as a threat to national security”.
Having become one of the American champions of AI, Anthropic is valued at nearly 1,000 billion $ and is preparing an IPO for the fall which promises to be record-breaking. Its relations with the Trump administration remain tense: in June, its most advanced models were subject to export controls for nearly three weeks, blocking their access to any non-American customer. This standoff comes as Donald Trump says he wants to preserve the American lead over China in AI.
