The lawsuit is one of two Anthropic filed over Mr. Hegseth’s unprecedented move, which came after Anthropic refused to allow the military to use AI chatbot Claude for U.S. surveillance or autonomous weapons due to safety and ethics concerns.
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A Washington, D.C. federal appeals court on Wednesday (April 8, 2026) declined to block the Pentagon’s national security blacklisting of Anthropic for now, a win for the Trump administration that comes after another appeals court came to the opposite conclusion in a separate legal challenge by Anthropic.
Anthropic, developer of the popular Claude AI assistant, alleges that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority when he designated the company a national security supply-chain risk, a label that blocks Anthropic from Pentagon contracts and could trigger a government-wide blacklisting. Anthropic executives have said the designation could cost the company billions of dollars in lost business and reputational harm.
A panel of judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied Anthropic’s bid to pause the designation while the case plays out. The decision is not a final ruling. The lawsuit is one of two Anthropic filed over Mr. Hegseth’s unprecedented move, which came after Anthropic refused to allow the military to use AI chatbot Claude for U.S. surveillance or autonomous weapons due to safety and ethics concerns.
Published – April 09, 2026 04:20 am IST
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