The Explainer-Anthropic case against the government: what the AI ​​company says happened

By Akash Sriram

March 9 (Reuters) – Anthropic sued the U.S. government on Monday, escalating a dispute that the artificial intelligence company sees as retaliation for refusing to remove safety limits from its Claude model.

The Amazon-backed company said it was willing to work with the military. Just “not under any terms.”

He also filed a related case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit challenging a “separate legal authority that the government invoked.”

The following account is based on the allegations made by Anthropic in its lawsuit.

WHAT ANTHROPIC SAY THE DISPUTE IS ABOUT

Anthropic said it spent years making Claude the most government-deployed frontier AI model, including on classified military networks, developing a specialized “Claude Gov” version and loosening many of its standard restrictions to accommodate national security work.

The conflict began in the fall of 2025 during negotiations over the Pentagon’s GenAI.mil platform, when the Department of Defense demanded that Anthropic completely abandon its usage policy and allow Claude to be used for, in the government’s words, “all legal uses.”

Anthropic said it largely agreed, except on two points it considered non-negotiable: It would not allow Claude to be used for lethal autonomous warfare without human supervision or for mass surveillance of Americans.

The company says Claude has not been tested for those uses and cannot safely perform them. He said he also offered to help transition the work to another provider if an agreement couldn’t be reached.

Pentagon officials have offered a different version of how the dispute began. The department’s chief technology officer said publicly that tensions rose after a U.S. raid in Venezuela, when an Anthropic executive called a counterpart at Palantir to ask if Claude had been used in the operation.

That account does not appear in Anthropic’s complaint.

FROM ULTIMATUM TO TOTAL BAN

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on February 24 and presented him with an ultimatum: comply within four days or “face one of two punishments: compulsion under the Defense Production Act or expulsion from the defense supply chain as a ‘national security risk.’

Amodei publicly rejected the lawsuit on February 26. The next day, before the 5:01 pm ET deadline expired, President Donald Trump posted a directive on Truth Social ordering all federal agencies to immediately cease all use of Anthropic’s technology.

In the social media post, the president characterized Anthropic as a “WOKE RADICAL LEFT COMPANY.”

Hours later, Hegseth announced on X that Anthropic was a “national security supply chain risk” and that no military contractors or suppliers could do commercial business with the company.

The agencies quickly lined up. The General Services Administration terminated Anthropic’s government contract. The Treasury, the State and the Federal Housing Finance Agency publicly severed ties. Anthropic’s complaint alleges that the Pentagon launched a major airstrike against Iran using Anthropic’s tools hours after the ban.

White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said the administration would not allow a company to “endanger our national security by dictating how the world’s largest and most powerful military operates,” adding that U.S. forces would “never be held hostage to the ideological whims of Big Tech leaders” and would follow the Constitution, “nor the terms of service of any artificial intelligence company.”

WHY ANTHROPIC DECIDED TO SUE

Anthropic maintains that the supply chain designation has no factual basis. The company points to its FedRAMP clearance, active security clearances and years of government praise, including from Hegseth, who called Claude’s capabilities “exquisite” at the Feb. 24 meeting.

Two senior Pentagon officials later told reporters that there was “no evidence of supply chain risk” and that the designation was “ideologically motivated.”

Anthropic raises five legal claims, arguing that the actions violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the president’s statutory authority, and the APA’s prohibition on sanctions of unauthorized agencies.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru)