Trump Ordered Anthropic Blacklisted Across Government; a Judge Found Retaliation

A Contract Dispute Became a Threat to the Company's Business

Donald Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic's technology on February 27, 2026, and threatened the company with civil and criminal consequences if it did not cooperate.¹ Secretary of War Pete Hegseth then announced that every military contractor, supplier, or partner must stop doing any commercial business with Anthropic, including business unrelated to the military.² According to evidence Anthropic submitted to Judge Rita Lin, three deals worth over $180 million fell apart on the verge of closing.¹ Lin ruled on August 27 that the broader measures constituted unlawful First Amendment retaliation, while the D.C. Circuit upheld the separate Pentagon-specific exclusion on September 25.²³ The narrower exclusion barred contractors from using Claude for Pentagon work; it did not bar their use of Claude for other clients.⁴³

This was Trump's own directive, followed by agency action: the General Services Administration removed Anthropic from its procurement schedule the same day and expressly said it was acting in support of his order.⁵ The charge is the use of government buying power to punish public criticism, the purpose Lin found behind the broader measures.²

Anthropic had supplied Claude Gov to the Department since March 2025 under a special government usage policy.¹ In fall 2025, the Department demanded permission for itself, its contractors, and its subcontractors to use every version of Claude for all lawful purposes; Anthropic refused to remove its restrictions on mass surveillance of Americans and lethal autonomous warfare.² Anthropic said fully autonomous weapons that select and engage targets without humans were beyond the technology's current reliability, and that mass domestic surveillance threatened fundamental liberties.⁶

At a February 24 meeting, Hegseth gave Anthropic until 5 p.m. on February 27 to agree, threatening a supply-chain-risk designation and exclusion from government business.² He also threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act to compel services without the restrictions, treating the same technology as essential to national security.² On February 26, chief executive Dario Amodei publicly refused and acknowledged the Department's right to choose a different contractor.⁶

The President's Order and the Secretary's Boycott

Trump posted at 3:47 p.m. Eastern time on February 27, before Hegseth's deadline.¹ He accused Anthropic of imposing its terms on the military and endangering national security, calling it a "RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY" and its employees "Leftwing nut jobs."²¹ The court treated his Truth Social post as the Presidential Directive.¹

Post on Truth Social, reproduced in the court's preliminary-injunction opinion¹

Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again! There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.

A little over an hour later, Hegseth announced that no contractor, supplier, or partner doing business with the military could conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.¹ Neither Trump nor Hegseth cited statutory authority in those directives.¹ Four days later, Hegseth signed two formal determinations, invoking 10 U.S.C. § 3252 and 41 U.S.C. § 4713.¹⁷ Lin wrote in March that the supply-chain-risk designation had never before been applied to a domestic company and was directed principally at foreign intelligence agencies, terrorists, and other hostile actors.¹ The two laws produced separate lawsuits and different outcomes.²³

Agencies Acted and Customers Pulled Back

GSA removed Anthropic from USAi.gov and its Multiple Award Schedule on February 27.⁵ Treasury and the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced an end to Claude use, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory told Anthropic it was shutting the model down.¹ The August ruling recorded Energy Department stop-work orders and DHS instructions to block access to Anthropic's tools.²

The effects spread to commercial customers.² Beyond the three deals worth over $180 million identified in the March ruling, the August ruling recorded that an Anthropic partner with a multimillion-dollar annual contract switched to a competing model for its FDA work.¹² Anthropic reported inquiries from over one hundred enterprise customers expressing fear, confusion, and doubt about the consequences of associating with it.² Trade associations representing government contractors described terminated contracts, frozen partnerships, disrupted workflows, and the need to reengineer products to keep Pentagon business.² Thirty-eight employees from major AI companies warned that the measures threatened open deliberation and professional debate about the technology's potential for catastrophic misuse.²

In April, the D.C. Circuit cited Amodei's statement that the vast majority of customers would be unaffected by the Pentagon exclusion, said precise financial harm was unclear, and noted some evidence that Anthropic had benefited financially from refusing the Department's demand.⁴ The narrower exclusion barred contractors from using Claude for Pentagon work; it did not bar their use of Claude for other clients.⁴³ Lin's August ruling credited Anthropic's projection that restoring the broader restrictions would cut defense-contractor and other Pentagon-related client revenue by 50–100 percent and its 2026 revenue by multiple billions of dollars.² Those were projected losses if the broader ban returned; Lin said the preliminary injunction had limited the measures' immediate effects.²

The Pentagon Exclusion Survived; the Broader Boycott Did Not

The government's strongest defense was operational trust: its summary-judgment brief denied retaliation, argued that Anthropic could manipulate future models to enforce its preferred restrictions, and urged deference to Hegseth's national-security judgment.⁸ It defended other agencies' switch as internal IT housekeeping and the President's authority to direct the executive branch.⁸

That defense won for the Pentagon exclusion in the D.C. Circuit on September 25.³ The narrower exclusion barred contractors from using Claude for Pentagon work; it did not bar their use of Claude for other clients.⁴³ Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao upheld it over Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson's dissent.³ The majority relied on earlier commercial Claude models refusing government requests to evaluate classified materials and process CDC infectious-disease research prompts.³ Anthropic said those refusals reflected commercial-model safeguards and were resolved with the government users; the majority nonetheless treated them as evidence that model training can enforce usage restrictions.³ It held that embedded restrictions could prevent necessary functions and that testing could not eliminate the risk.³ The majority rejected both constitutional claims.³ It found adequate notice and an opportunity to contest the exclusion, and concluded the Department acted because Anthropic refused an essential contract term, rather than because of its advocacy.³ The court acknowledged that Anthropic could not remotely change deployed models, but accepted the risk from future versions and Hegseth's June 3 clarification that his decision did not depend on post-deployment control.³

Lin's August 27 ruling addressed different actions: Trump's government-wide directive, Hegseth's broader boycott of private business, and the designation under the narrower military statute.² She found unlawful First Amendment retaliation, denial of required process under the Fifth Amendment, and a designation that violated that statute and was arbitrary and capricious.² These were merits findings, replacing March's preliminary assessment.² The government conceded that Hegseth lacked statutory authority to forbid all commercial business between Anthropic and military contractors; Lin held that the boycott was a final agency action contrary to law.²

Lin found that the government's four-page rationale came after the public directives, that Anthropic had no backdoor access to deployed national-security models, and that the government conceded its technology was no riskier than other opaque AI models.² The Department continued pursuing a contract immediately after the designation and, as of August, the government was discussing sensitive uses of Anthropic's newer Mythos model.² Lin found those actions inconsistent with a genuine belief that Anthropic would sabotage its software.²

The government also won some claims before Lin.² She rejected Anthropic's claim that Trump had clearly exceeded his constitutional authority to issue the directive.² Agencies that had not acted won judgment in their favor; others won certain procurement-law claims because their steps were temporary rather than final.² Her ruling left the Department free to choose another vendor.² Lin held that declaratory relief, cancellation of the unlawful agency actions, and a permanent injunction were warranted, with relief to issue separately; she denied the government's request for a seven-day administrative stay.²

The appellate ruling did not overturn Lin's decision: the military statute governing her case, 10 U.S.C. § 3252, targets an adversary's sabotage or subversion, while the law governing the Pentagon exclusion, 41 U.S.C. § 4713, covers any person's manipulation of technology.³ The majority accepted Lin's conclusion that Anthropic lacked the bad motive required by the military statute, but held that the broader statute did not require it.³ Henderson dissented because she read the broader statute as targeting deceptive, subversive conduct, rather than a supplier's open enforcement of usage restrictions.³ The decisions settle those legal questions; whether changing AI suppliers improved military reliability remains unmeasured in either ruling.²³

The Threat and the Contract Records

Trump also proposed, in public, ending Elon Musk's federal contracts during their quarrel.⁹ On June 5, 2025, he posted that he had asked Musk to leave and accused him of reacting angrily.¹⁰ Twenty-eight seconds later he added: "The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts."⁹

A Federal Procurement Data System search for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., SpaceX's registered name, from that day through August 6, 2026 found no contract terminated for default or cause.¹¹ It found two partial convenience terminations that cut committed funds on one continuing order by $50,000 and $15,000, and a canceled $12,090.68 satellite-internet order for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which the same office followed sixteen days later with a $13,057.94 order for the same agency's service.¹¹ The search covered one company name and contracts only, not affiliates, grants, loans, tax credits, or licenses, and nothing in it shows that Trump's proposal caused a cancellation or saved taxpayers money.¹¹ It shows the government still buying: NASA added $400 million to an existing commercial-crew order on August 29, 2025, and the State Department bought $8,209,572 of satellite kits and service on September 2.¹¹

On April 29, 2025, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, saying she had just gotten off the phone with Trump, called Amazon's reported plan to display tariff costs beside prices "a hostile and political act by Amazon."¹² Neither she nor Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened government action at the briefing, and Amazon said its discount Haul team had considered displaying import charges but that the idea was never approved and would not happen.¹²¹³

Fifty Names in a Signed Order

On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14152, directing revocation of "any current or active clearances" held by fifty people it names: forty-nine former intelligence officials and John Bolton.¹⁴ The order says the officials who signed a 2020 campaign letter discrediting reporting about Hunter Biden "willfully weaponized the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process."¹⁴ It says Bolton "published a memoir for monetary gain" that was "rife with sensitive information drawn from his time in government."¹⁴ It reaches only clearances still held and does not show how many of the fifty had one.¹⁴

The strongest defense is executive discretion over classified information: in Department of the Navy v. Egan, the Supreme Court held that granting a clearance is an inherently discretionary executive judgment and emphasized courts' reluctance to intrude on national-security decisions.¹⁵ That limits what courts review.¹⁵ It does not decide whether Congress should accept a President's use of clearance decisions against named political adversaries.¹⁵¹⁶

The Biden Children's Protective Details

On March 17, 2025, a reporter told Trump that eighteen Secret Service agents were protecting Hunter Biden in South Africa; Trump said he had just heard and would look into it that afternoon.¹⁷ Hours later he posted, citing taxpayer expense, the number of agents, and Hunter's destination: "Please be advised that, effective immediately, Hunter Biden will no longer receive Secret Service protection. Likewise, Ashley Biden who has 13 agents will be taken off the list."¹⁸ The Secret Service told reporters it would comply.¹⁹ Neither statement gave a savings figure.¹⁸¹⁹

18 U.S.C. § 3056 authorizes protection and lists a former President's children only while under sixteen; it does not require continuing protection for the two adults.²⁰ The Associated Press reported that Biden had extended their protection until July and that Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush had also extended their families' protection on leaving office.¹⁹ Trump personally directed the withdrawal from two named members of his predecessor's family.¹⁸

The Charge Congress Can Judge

The distinction is concrete: the Pentagon could choose another vendor, and the D.C. Circuit upheld its separate statutory exclusion; Lin found that the broader punishment violated the Constitution and procurement law.²³ The narrower exclusion barred contractors from using Claude for Pentagon work; it did not bar their use of Claude for other clients.⁴³ The lawful narrower exclusion does not erase the lost deals, disrupted contracting relationships, or chilling effects described in the broader case.¹²

Presidential criminal immunity supplies no answer to that congressional judgment.²¹ In Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court barred motive inquiries when courts distinguish official from unofficial acts for criminal immunity, but described impeachment separately as Congress's political process for removing a President for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.²¹ The precedent for judging misuse of executive agencies is Nixon's Article II, which the House Judiciary Committee adopted 28 to 10 in 1974 and which charged violations of citizens' rights and misuse of executive personnel.¹⁶ Johnson's speech-based Article X was initially rejected, then adopted by the House; the Senate never voted on it.²²

Trump's blacklist was not his only public intervention against named private parties: his signed order targeted any active clearances of fifty former officials, and his March post withdrew protection from the Biden children.¹⁴¹⁸

The central abuse was a government-wide blacklist and an announced boycott of private business that Judge Lin found punished a company's public criticism.² Trump issued the directive himself, threatened further consequences, and agencies acted in his name.¹⁵ That is retaliation through public power, with documented costs to the company and other contractors, and it is a concrete abuse of office for Congress to judge.²¹⁶