Judge rules Trump administration illegally punished AI firm Anthropic

A judge late Thursday permanently barred the Trump administration from enforcing a set of rules aimed at cutting off Anthropic from the federal government, ruling the administration had unconstitutionally punished the artificial intelligence company for protected speech.

The ruling marks a victory for Anthropic in its monthslong legal battle against the administration over its push to impose guardrails on its powerful AI model Claude, which is used by the military. Anthropic sought to prevent Claude from being used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, but the military argued it should be allowed to use the model for all lawful purposes. 

With the two sides unable to reach a deal, President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Claude earlier this year, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the firm a supply chain risk, aiming to prevent private defense contractors from using it to do work for the military. The administration argued those moves were necessary to safeguard national security.

In her ruling Thursday, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin of San Francisco declared that those actions violated the First Amendment by punishing it for disagreeing with the government, calling them “unlawful retaliation against Anthropic for constitutionally protected expressive activities.” She also said the moves against Anthropic violated the company’s due process rights.

Lin said her order does not require the government to use Anthropic or stop it from giving another AI firm its business, “so long as those actions are consistent with applicable regulations, statutes, and constitutional provisions.”

“The government is certainly owed deference on weighty issues of national security,” Lin wrote in a 59-page opinion. “But Defendants’ contemporaneous words and deeds confirm that the challenged actions were based on a desire to make a public example out of Anthropic for its ‘arrogance’ in criticizing the government, not based on any articulable basis to believe that Anthropic would actually sabotage its model.”

This is a breaking story; it will be updated.