Anthropic suing the U.S. Department of War perhaps wasn’t a surprise, but it was nevertheless a shock.
This is the sort of thing that has happened, but is rare—and a matter of last resort. For more than a week, the Pentagon and Anthropic, valued at $380 billion, have been wrapped in a very public conflict over how the Trump Administration can (and can’t) use AI. The result: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth last week designated the company a “supply chain risk.”
In its lawsuit, filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Anthropic says the Pentagon’s actions are “unprecedented and unlawful.” It also claims that, for Anthropic, “hundreds of millions of dollars” of government contracts are either canceled or in jeopardy. This is the comment that Anthropic offered to my colleague Beatrice Nolan: “Seeking judicial review does not change our longstanding commitment to harnessing AI to protect our national security, but this is a necessary step to protect our business, our customers, and our partners.”
In short, “we’re not letting this go.” And it’s worth saying: There’s absolutely precedent for a large, emerging tech giant suing the government, albeit in different circumstances. Consider Palantir: In 2016, the company sued the U.S. Army over its intelligence software procurement process, arguing it wasn’t getting a fair opportunity to compete—and a federal judge ultimately sided with Palantir. Something similar happened in 2014, when SpaceX sued the U.S. Air Force. SpaceX demanded that its rockets be allowed to compete for key launches, and the two sides eventually settled. (SpaceX won many launch contracts in the years that followed.) And even incumbents aren’t immune to fights like this: There was also the DoD’s $10 billion JEDI cloud contract with Microsoft, which led to separate lawsuits from Amazon and Oracle (an imbroglio the government only resolved by annulling the contract in 2021).
