Anthropic filed a petition on Tuesday asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to rehear its challenge to the Pentagon's designation of the company as a supply chain risk2.
The Defense Department labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk in March, and the company sued the Trump administration to undo the action. In September, the D.C. Circuit upheld the Pentagon's decision.
In the filing, Anthropic attorneys wrote that "the Secretary of War branded Anthropic — an American AI company whose models help defend the nation — a national-security 'supply chain risk' because it declined to permit its models to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or lethal autonomous warfare and publicly explained those AI-safety commitments". The petition described the earlier ruling as one in which "a divided panel upheld that extraordinary designation".
ANALYSIS The reference to a "divided panel" indicates at least one appellate judge dissented from the September ruling, a procedural detail that can strengthen a rehearing petition.
Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the Pentagon in July 2025 and began negotiating Claude's deployment on the Defense Department's GenAI.mil AI platform that September, according to reporting aggregated by CNBC. The blacklisting in March followed those engagements.
ANALYSIS The sequence — a nine-figure defense contract, platform integration talks, then a supply chain risk designation tied to the company's stated refusal to support certain military applications — frames the dispute as a direct collision between Anthropic's published safety commitments and Pentagon procurement requirements.