A federal judge barred the Defense Department from enforcing its ban on using technology from Anthropic, a leading AI firm, calling the prohibition more a fit of rage than a well-founded policy.
Judge Rita Lin, a Biden appointee to the Northern District of California in San Francisco, said the administration’s justification for the ban was “slim,” and mostly fabricated after the fact. She said the ban boiled down to anger at Anthropic’s criticism of the Trump administration.
That, she ruled, wasn’t sufficient.
“Neither the Constitution nor the federal statute invoked by defendants allows them to impose sweeping penalties based principally on Anthropic’s critique of the administration’s views,” she wrote.
She also pointed out that even as Secretary Pete Hegseth carried out the ban, he was talking about the firm “as essential to national security rather than a threat to it.” And he continued to pursue a contract with the firm.
“None of that is consistent with a genuine fear that Anthropic is a saboteur who would poison its software to harm national security,” Judge Lin wrote.
She had earlier issued an injunction preventing the ban from taking effect.
Her new ruling is a final judgment in favor of Anthropic in the California case.
The Defense Department has entered a partnership involving Anthropic’s Claude, an artificial intelligence assistant, beginning in late 2024 through a Palantir arrangement; the department signed a formal $200 million contract with Anthropic in July 2025.
Anthropic, worried about some potential uses of Claude, wrote into its contract that the tool could not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or “lethal autonomous warfare.”
Judge Lin said that’s purely a contract issue, and Anthropic doesn’t have any way, technologically, of enforcing it on the Defense Department.
Around September 2025, the department began to object, calling on Anthropic to drop those terms from the contract and instead permit it for “all lawful uses.”
That led to a nasty, and public back-and-forth, and eventually the ban, announced by President Trump and Mr. Hegseth in February, and a subsequent declaration that Anthropic had been deemed a “supply chain risk” under the law.
“The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment, and that Anthropic was denied the pre-deprivation process required under the Fifth Amendment,” Judge Lin concluded.
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