Anthropic challenges US Pentagon’s ban in San Francisco court showdown - Al Jazeera

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin had a pointed question for the Justice Department on Tuesday: what evidence shows Anthropic could still tamper with Claude after the model was delivered and locked inside air-gapped government systems? The question, described in court filings, cuts to the heart of the Pentagons case for blacklisting the AI company — and the governments answer, so far, appears to be thin.

Anthropic filed suit March 9 challenging its designation as a supply chain risk under 10 USC 3252, a statute designed to protect military systems from foreign sabotage. The company, represented by Williams & Connolly partner Chris Mattei, argues the move is unprecedented — the first time a U.S. company has faced such a designation — and unlawful, violating First and Fifth Amendment rights. A hearing before Judge Lin, a Biden appointee, was scheduled for 1:30 PM PT in San Francisco on Tuesday.

The technical centerpiece of Anthropics defense is a declaration from Thiyagu Ramasamy, the companys infrastructure lead who spent six years at Amazon Web Services managing government AI deployments, including classified environments, before joining Anthropic in 2025. Ramasamys account is direct: once Claude is deployed inside a government-secured, air-gapped system operated by a third-party contractor, Anthropic has no access to it. No remote kill switch. No back door. No mechanism to push unauthorized updates. The government, he argues, is treating a system it cannot reach as if it were a remote-controlled one.nnSarah Heck, who runs Anthropics government relationships and policy work after serving on the Obama-era National Security Council, offered a separate account of the negotiation history that is harder to square with the governments narrative. The Pentagons filing claims Anthropic wanted an approval role over military operations — a role Heck said was never raised by anyone at the company during talks. At no time, she wrote, did I or any other Anthropic employee state that the company wanted that kind of role.

The timing makes it stranger. On March 4 — the day after the Pentagon formally finalized its supply-chain risk designation — Under Secretary Emil Michael emailed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to say the two sides were very close on the two issues the government now cites as evidence that Anthropic is a national security threat. The message was included in court filings first reported by TechCrunch.

Mattei, the outside counsel, was blunt in his own declaration: the government is relying completely on conjectural, speculative imaginings to justify a very, very serious legal step theyve taken against Anthropic. The DOJs 40-page filing argues Anthropic might disable its technology mid-operation if its corporate red lines were crossed — a concern Anthropic denies is grounded in any real negotiation history or technical capability.

The stakes are commercial as well as legal. Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the Pentagon in July 2025 and was the first AI lab to deploy its technology across the agencys classified networks. Executives have said the blacklisting could cut 2026 revenue by billions of dollars. Palantir, for its part, is continuing to use Claude in its department work as the case proceeds — CEO Alex Karp told CNBC the company does not intend to stop.nnSenator Elizabeth Warren, in a letter to the Defense Departments inspector general, raised a concern that extends beyond this single contract. Her worry: that DoD is using the designation process to strong-arm American companies into providing tools to spy on American citizens and deploy fully autonomous weapons without adequate safeguards. Its a broader argument about how the statute is being used — not just whether it applies in this case.nnJudge Lins question about ongoing access is the right one to ask. The legal framework Anthropic is challenging was built for foreign adversaries, not domestic labs with a track record of deploying in classified environments. If the governments theory depends on Anthropic retaining the ability to reach inside systems it has already delivered, the Ramasamy declaration says that theory doesnt match how the architecture actually works. The hearing Tuesday is the first test of whether the court agrees.