Judge blocks Pentagon effort to 'punish' Anthropic with supply chain risk label

JohnTHaller

Some judicial pushback against authoritarian policies is good to see.

paulpauper

So much for all that alarmism a month ago. Just got to be patient and wait for cooler heads to prevail. Or it goes to show how Anthropic handled it well, by making their case as persuasively and assertively without delay as they had done.

0x3f

Is the practical outcome much different? I doubt they'll get contracts either way, so the labelling was just a formality. If anything it seems the label was just intended to give a veneer of legitimacy to the admin by using an existing mechanism and terminology, rather than saying "we're going to block your access because we feel like it".

charcircuit

What's the point of a supply chain risk distinction if you can't mark a company as a risk if they express that they will be a risk?

dataflow

I assume the court case [1] is referring to 10 U.S. Code § 3252 [2]? [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72379655/134/anthropic-... [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/3252

tim4ock

Not surprising given since Biden appointed Rita F. Lin as a U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of California, confirmed by the Senate in a 52-45 vote on September 19, 2023. Won't stick on appeals and for sure if it makes it to the supreme court will be a costly suit.

jimbob45

Lost in the cacophony is the fact that Anthropic fumbled a strong lifeline while hemorrhaging cash without a business model. It’s fun to look down at OpenAI but they may not get another chance like this again.

mrkstu

The issue of course is that the Judge can't change the knowledge that the head of the executive doesn't want people down the chain using this product, so they won't. Anthropic is a dead letter in government circles until the next Presidential election.

mr_00ff00

Had this conversation with a friend, but I think as an America you can be very optimistic about the institutional strength of democracy in the country. People are very pessimistic recently, but if anything, we are seeing that our system works well. A person got into power that a majority voted for, but when he oversteps, the courts and other institutions (even judges and fed reserve chairs he picked!) seem to hold him to the rules. I get the pessimism, but for the most part, I kinda think the system is working.

yen223

How many of you had to stop using Claude because of the Pentagon edict?

stainablesteel

i think the military should be able to do what it wants last i checked the german military is held down by stupid obligations forced onto it by its government that make it both inefficient and obsolete

telotortium

Just a district judge, so I’m supposing the Trump administration will file an appeal if they care, and will almost certainly get a preliminary injunction. The Ninth Circuit ruling will be more telling.

xvector

Unfortunately the Pentagon can and will appeal, and the 9th Circuit and higher courts are excessively deferential on "matters of national security."

yalogin

Glad to see the judicial system works sometimes atleast. Less cynically now, the president has admired Xi many many times openly, and it’s clear he prefers an administrative style similar to China. That is what he is turning the country into. Everybody goes and bends the knee like the tech ceos did and he controls every aspect of the administration with an iron fist, just like China.

panny

>10 U.S.C. § 3252 authorizes the Secretary of Defense to exclude a source from defense procurements involving national security systems if there is a supply chain risk, defined as the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or subvert a covered system. I think any LLM is covered by that, but specifically for Anthropic, >Recent research has uncovered several critical vulnerabilities, including the "Claudy Day" attack chain which allows silent data exfiltration through conversation history, and a zero-click XSS prompt injection in the Chrome extension that enabled attackers to inject prompts without user interaction until a patch was released in February 2026. What is obvious to me however is the timing. This Trump pants-shitting happened just before the Iran invasion. You can just imagine it. Trump wants to send fully autonomous bots into Iran to destroy the non-existent nuclear program. Anthropic leadership tries to make a moral stand saying innocent civilians could die. Trump doesn't care because he wants zero US military casualties even if it means a school full of Iranian children is bombed and everyone is killed. And then we get exactly that plus a forever war. And obviously, the judge is out of her lane too... since, you know, the rule basically can apply to any AI agent because they're just as likely to do what you ask as they are to delete all your emails without even apologizing for it.