U.S. Judge Blocks Trump Defense Department’s Anthropic Blacklisting

Jack Queen, Reuters:

A U.S. judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic, ​the latest turn in the Claude maker’s high-stakes fight with the military over AI safety on the battlefield.

Anthropic’s lawsuit in California federal court alleges that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority when he designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk, a label the government can apply to companies that expose military systems to potential infiltration or sabotage by adversaries. [...]

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, an appointee of former Democratic President Joe Biden, ​made the ruling in a 59-page order where she found that the Pentagon’s decision was “illegal and baseless.”

“The empty invocation of national ​security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,” she wrote.

The imperial aspects of Trump 2.0 are increasingly coming apart at the seams.