The Trump administration has appealed a federal judge’s ruling that temporarily blocked the Pentagon from designating Anthropic a supply chain risk—escalating what is already one of the most consequential legal fights in AI history. The Justice Department filed the notice on Thursday, signalling it has no intention of backing down despite a stinging judicial rebuke that called its actions “Orwellian” and potentially capable of “crippling” the company.The appeal goes to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which has set an April 30 deadline for the government to submit its formal arguments for why the lower court’s decision should be overturned.
A judge called the Pentagon’s actions ‘Orwellian’—here’s what sparked the fight
The dispute traces back to a collapsed $200 million defense contract. Anthropic had drawn two firm red lines: it didn’t want its Claude AI used in autonomous weapons or for mass domestic surveillance. The Pentagon pushed back, arguing no private contractor could dictate how the military uses technology it pays for.When talks broke down in February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took the unusual step of labelling Anthropic a supply chain risk—a designation previously reserved for foreign adversaries. President Trump simultaneously ordered all federal agencies to stop using Claude entirely.US District Judge Rita Lin last week put those actions on hold, calling them “broad punitive measures” that appeared arbitrary. In a 43-page ruling, she wrote that nothing in law supports “the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the US for expressing disagreement with the government.”
The Pentagon called the ruling a ‘disgrace’—and now it wants the Ninth Circuit to fix that
Pentagon chief technology officer Emil Michael called Lin’s ruling a “disgrace” and said it would disrupt Hegseth’s ability to “conduct military operations with the partners it chooses.” He claimed the judgment contained dozens of factual errors—without specifying any.Anthropic, meanwhile, is fighting on two fronts. A separate, narrower case challenging how Hegseth invoked the supply chain authority is still pending before a D.C. federal appeals court.The April 30 filing deadline means the legal uncertainty hanging over Anthropic—and its government and commercial customers—isn’t going away anytime soon.
