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.