The Justice Department filed its first formal rebuttal to Anthropic‘s Pentagon lawsuit this week, pushing back hard against the AI company’s constitutional arguments and raising a stark national security scenario: that Anthropic could theoretically disable or alter its own model mid-conflict if it decided its corporate red lines were being crossed.
Anthropic filed two federal lawsuits challenging the Pentagon’s decision to label it a supply chain risk and sever its government contracts. The March 24 hearing on Anthropic’s request for a preliminary injunction now shapes up as the first major judicial test of whether the Trump administration overstepped its authority — or whether the Pentagon had every right to walk away.
In a filing Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, DOJ attorneys urged Judge Rita F. Lin to deny Anthropic’s injunction request. The government argued the supply chain designation is “lawful and reasonable,” and that Anthropic’s First Amendment claim is unlikely to succeed because refusing a contract term is conduct, not protected speech.
Pointing to the wartime context of the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, the filing warned that an AI vendor with veto power over its own model’s use could “preemptively alter the behavior of its model either before or during ongoing warfighting operations” — a risk the Department of Defense deemed unacceptable.
Anthropic’s original complaint called the blacklisting an “unprecedented and unlawful” campaign of retaliation, arguing the supply chain risk label — historically applied only to foreign adversaries like Huawei — cannot be legally weaponized against a domestic company over a policy disagreement.
CFO Krishna Rao, in a sworn declaration filed alongside the complaint, estimated the designation put “multiple billions of dollars” in 2026 revenue at risk. Anthropic also filed a parallel emergency stay petition in the DC Circuit.
Since the initial filing, the company has drawn a wide coalition of supporters. Nearly 150 retired federal and state judges — appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents — filed an amicus brief warning of the precedent the designation sets for government control over private companies.
Scientists and researchers from OpenAI and Google DeepMind filed separately in their personal capacities. Major tech industry groups representing hundreds of Pentagon contractors followed, arguing the procurement system “becomes contingent on political favor rather than the rule of law” if the blacklisting stands.
Former senior national security officials, a group of Catholic ethicists, and multiple civil liberties organizations also filed in support.
White House spokeswoman Liz Huston has said the president “will never allow a radical left, woke company” to dictate military operations. The Pentagon declined to comment on active litigation.
OpenAI struck a Pentagon deal hours after the Anthropic blacklist — one that preserved the same prohibitions on autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance that Anthropic had refused to abandon. The DOJ’s rebuttal does not address that irony directly.
Judge Lin will hear arguments on whether to grant Anthropic temporary relief while the full case proceeds on March 24.
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