Trump blacklisting of "woke" Anthropic deemed illegal by federal judge

Anthropic refused to support lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance. The Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal, a federal judge ruled in an order vacating government directives against the use of the firm’s AI technology. The government illegally retaliated against Anthropic by designating it a supply-chain risk to national security, said yesterday’s ruling by Judge Rita Lin in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The maker of Claude AI technology was barred by the US after it refused to drop restrictions on the use of its products for lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans, the ruling said. “The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment,” Lin wrote in an order that granted key portions of Anthropic’s motion for summary judgment. As Lin noted, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “ordered all federal agencies to permanently stop using Anthropic’s products, and banned all defense contractors from doing any business with Anthropic, even if unrelated to the military.” Lin vacated those government actions and ordered the Trum