Judge grants Anthropic preliminary injunction against Department of War designation
Judge Rita Lin found Anthropic likely to prevail on First Amendment, due-process and Administrative Procedure Act claims, calling the designation 'classic illegal First Amendment retaliation'.
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US District Judge Rita Lin, in the Northern District of California, granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction blocking the Department of War’s supply-chain-risk designation, Trump’s directive excluding Anthropic from federal work, and Defense Secretary Hegseth’s order blacklisting the company from the defense industrial base, pending full resolution of Anthropic’s underlying suit.
Lin found Anthropic likely to succeed on all three legal theories it had advanced — First Amendment retaliation, Fifth Amendment due process, and exceeding statutory authority under the Administrative Procedure Act. On the retaliation claim, central to the ruling, she wrote that “nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government,” and separately that punishing Anthropic for bringing public scrutiny to the government’s contracting position was “classic illegal First Amendment retaliation.” The finding treated Anthropic’s public refusal to drop restrictions on autonomous-weapons use and mass surveillance — and its public statements about that refusal — as protected speech that the designation had punished, rather than as a legitimate basis for a national-security finding.
The ruling did not end the dispute. The government appealed, and while the district court injunction remained in place, the case moved in parallel through the D.C. Circuit, where Anthropic had filed a companion challenge in early March. That appellate track produced a different outcome on 8 April, when the D.C. Circuit declined to stay a separate part of the designation pending its own review, leaving Anthropic excluded from Department of War contracts specifically even as Lin’s order continued to bar enforcement of the broader government-wide directive. The split outcome left Anthropic litigating on two fronts, with the core legal question — whether the government could use a national-security designation to punish a contractor for refusing specific contract terms — still unresolved months into the case.