Anthropic seeks rehearing of case over Pentagon’s security risk branding

Anthropic asked a US appeals court on Tuesday to reconsider a ruling that upheld the Pentagon’s decision to label the AI company as a national security supply chain risk over a dispute about safety guardrails on its technology.

A federal appeals court in September upheld the designation in a 2-1 decision, agreeing with the Pentagon that the firm’s safety restrictions could compromise military operations.

The Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company has cost it billions of dollars in lost business, Anthropic has said.

The court’s majority said the Pentagon acted reasonably after Anthropic refused to allow its AI to be used in autonomous weapons or mass surveillance, and the court rejected the firm’s claim that it faced retaliation by the Defense Department over its views on AI safety.

In its petition on Tuesday to the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, for a rehearing, Anthropic argued that the panel majority misinterpreted and transformed a federal law “aimed at hostile foreign actors into one that presumptively reaches every government contractor.”

The court let the Pentagon take action against Anthropic “without any pre-designation process and despite straightforward evidence the designation was retaliation for Anthropic’s speech about AI safety,” the company said.

In a separate lawsuit in August, a federal judge in California struck down a parallel designation under a different law.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for regulation covering all US frontier AI companies, while the Trump administration has favored a pro-growth approach.