A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday denied Anthropic’s request to temporarily block the Department of Defense’s blacklisting of the artificial intelligence company as a lawsuit challenging that sanction plays out.
The ruling comes after a judge in San Francisco federal court late last month, in a separate but related case, granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction that bars the Trump administration from enforcing a ban on the use of Claude.
“In our view, the equitable balance here cuts in favor of the government,” the appeals court said in its decision. “On one side is a relatively contained risk of financial harm to a single private company. On the other side is judicial management of how, and through whom, the Department of War secures vital AI technology during an active military conflict. For that reason, we deny Anthropic’s motion for a stay pending review on the merits.”
With the split decisions by the two courts, Anthropic is excluded from DOD contracts but is able to continue working with other government agencies while litigation plays out.
The DOD declared Anthropic a supply chain risk in early March, meaning that use of the company’s technology purportedly threatens U.S. national security. The label requires defense contractors to certify that they don’t use Anthropic’s Claude AI models in their work with the military.
