The War on Anthropic: Pretextual Designation and Unlawful Punishment

(Harold Hongju Koh, Bruce Swartz, Avi Gupta and Brady Worthington – Just Security) On Feb. 27, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced—via tweet—that he had directed his Department to “designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security.” Accordingly, Hegseth claimed, “no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” As one former Trump advisor put it, the designation amounted to “attempted corporate murder.” Soon thereafter, U.S. President Donald Trump chimed in via Truth Social, directing “EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology.” “The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic,” the President threatened, “better get their act together, and be helpful” in phasing out their technology from government use or he would “use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.” Trump invoked no authority for his actions, although the Treasury Department, for one, soon followed his lead. The Department of Defense officially informed Anthropic of the designation on Mar. 5, and even before that official communication some defense contractors were already reportedly removing Anthropic’s frontier AI model Claude from their systems in response to the Administration’s perceived “blacklisting” of Anthropic. While there are reports that talks may be ongoing between the Department of Defense and Anthropic to attempt to resolve this dispute, the underlying issues raised by the Administration’s attack on Anthropic will persist. The use of rarely-invoked national security authorities to target Anthropic is not a one-off action by this Administration. It should instead be viewed as the latest chapter in a concerted campaign of pretextual retaliations—parading in the guise of emergency national security regulation—that have characterized the second Trump Administration. Anthropic is but the latest in a long and growing list of targets of Donald Trump’s punitive presidency. President Trump has previously attempted to wield the power of the presidency to punish, among others, his political opponents, law firms that hired or represented them, universities whose administrative decisions he disagreed with, journalistic outlets that refused to use his preferred terminology, and companies that refused to fire Trump’s political enemies. The background of the Trump Administration-Anthropic dispute has been treated in greater depth elsewhere. But the underlying disagreement is straightforward. The Department of Defense demanded that Anthropic, as a Department contractor, not prevent its technology from being used both for domestic mass surveillance of Americans and for fully autonomous lethal weapons. After Anthropic refused to abandon those core principles against such uses, Hegseth not only announced that the Department’s contract with Anthropic would be cancelled, but labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk”—exiled, by fiat, from doing business with the federal government as well as (according to Hegseth) any other government contractor. What Anthropic believed to be core principled limitations on how its technology should be used, Hegseth characterized as Anthropic’s “cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.” – The War on Anthropic: Pretextual Designation and Unlawful Punishment