The stakes in the case—how much the government can punish a company for not playing ball—were apparent from the start. Anthropic drew lots of senior supporters with unlikely bedfellows among them, including former authors of President Trump’s AI policy.
But Judge Rita Lin’s 43-page opinion suggests that what is really a contract dispute never needed to reach such a frenzy. It did so because the government disregarded the existing process for how such disputes are governed and fueled the fire with social media posts from officials that would eventually contradict the positions it took in court. The Pentagon, in other words, wanted a culture war (on top of the actual war in Iran that began hours later).
The government used Anthropic’s Claude for much of 2025 without complaint, according to court documents, while the company walked a branding tightrope as a safety-focused AI company that also won defense contracts. Defense employees accessing it through Palantir were required to accept terms of a government-specific usage policy that Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan said “prohibited mass surveillance of Americans and lethal autonomous warfare” (Kaplan’s declaration to the court didn’t include details of the policy). Only when the government aimed to contract with Anthropic directly did the disagreements begin.
What drew the ire of the judge is that when these disagreements became public, they had more to do with punishment than just cutting ties with Anthropic. And they had a pattern: Tweet first, lawyer later.
President Trump’s post on Truth Social on February 27 referenced “Leftwing nutjobs” at Anthropic and directed every federal agency to stop using the company’s AI. This was echoed soon after by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said he’d direct the Pentagon to label Anthropic a supply chain risk.
Doing so necessitates that the secretary take a specific set of actions, which the judge found Hegseth did not complete. Letters sent to congressional committees, for example, said that less drastic steps were evaluated and deemed not possible, without providing any further details. The government also said the designation as a supply chain risk was necessary because Anthropic could implement a “kill switch,” but its lawyers later had to admit it had no evidence of that, the judge wrote.
Hegseth’s post also stated that “No contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” But the government’s own lawyers admitted on Tuesday that the Secretary doesn’t have the power to do that, and agreed with the judge that the statement had “absolutely no legal effect at all.”
The aggressive posts also led the judge to also conclude that Anthropic was on solid ground in complaining that its First Amendment rights were violated. The government, the judge wrote while citing the posts, “set out to publicly punish Anthropic for its ‘ideology’ and ‘rhetoric,’ as well as its ‘arrogance’ for being unwilling to compromise those beliefs.”