Tech company filed amicus brief in support of Anthropic’s effort to overturn an aggressive Pentagon designation
Microsoft has thrown its weight behind Anthropic’s legal challenge against the US Pentagon, filing a court brief in support of the AI company’s effort to overturn an aggressive designation that effectively bars it from government work.
In an amicus brief submitted to a federal court in San Francisco this week, Microsoft, which integrates Anthropic’s AI tools into systems it provides to the US military, argued that a temporary restraining order was necessary to prevent serious disruption to suppliers whose products rely on the AI company’s technology. Google, Amazon, Apple and OpenAI have also signed on to a brief in support of Anthropic.
Microsoft is one of the Pentagon’s most deeply embedded tech partners, holding a share of the military’s Joe Biden-era $9bn Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract alongside Amazon, Google and Oracle, as well as separate software and enterprise services deals worth several billion dollars more. Microsoft’s contracts with the government span defense, intelligence and civilian agencies, and under the Trump administration in September, Microsoft struck another multibillion dollar deal to help usher along cloud services and AI advancement in the federal government.
