Court says national security cannot punish Anthropic for AI safety limits
The Pentagon tried to turn Anthropic’s refusal to allow autonomous lethal weapons and mass surveillance into a government-wide blacklist. Judge Rita Lin called that unlawful retaliation under the First Amendment, vacated the supply-chain-risk designation, and ordered the administration to rescind its directives. The practical stakes are larger than one vendor: safety boundaries can now be treated as protected speech, not a procurement liability.