Appeals court upholds Pentagon's exclusion of Claude from supply chain

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld the Department of War's decision to remove Anthropic AI product Claude from its supply chain.

"The Department had ample support for its conclusion that the continued integration of Claude into the Department’s information systems, by the Department or its contractors, presented a statutorily covered national-security risk," the court wrote.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth initially ordered Claude's exclusion under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018.

"[I]n our Republic, it is the President and the Secretary of War who must determine how best to balance the competing risks," the court wrote. "In doing so here, the Secretary did not transgress any limits on his authority under the Supply Chain Security Act or the Constitution."

The ruling follows a federal judge in California finding that the Pentagon had inappropriately labeled Anthropic as a "supply chain risk."

President Donald Trump has been generally supportive of AI, opposed a slowdown of its development, and backed continued construction of data centers.

Ben Whedon is the Chief Political Correspondent for Just the News. Follow him on X.