The use of “any person” shows that the definition is not limited to adversaries or foreign entities, the court said. The court also noted the word “deny,” which it said applies to Anthropic preventing the United States from using certain functions of Claude.
“In summary, we conclude that the Secretary’s concern about Anthropic preventing Claude from taking legal actions requested by the Department qualifies as a ‘supply chain risk’ within the meaning of section 4713,” the court majority said. It also said that “the Department reasonably feared that Anthropic could manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national security functions that the Department considers contractually authorized and necessary.”
judge’s dissent
The dissenting opinion was issued by Judge Karen Henderson, appointed by George HW Bush. Henderson challenged the majority’s interpretation of the definition at 4713, saying that when “viewed in their legal context, all of the verbs at issue are directed to deliberately impede or spy on the ‘function, use, or operation’ of a covered item that has entered the federal supply chain.”
Congress “enacted the statute in response to calls from the U.S. intelligence community for legislation to address the threat of ‘[h]Hostile nation state and other bad actors infiltrating the federal government’s information and technology systems through its supply chains,” Henderson wrote. He said the definition should not be interpreted to cover “a contractor’s honest and direct application of restrictions on the use of a covered item that is not favored by the government.”
Anthropic alleged, and the California district court judge agreed, that the Trump administration unlawfully retaliated against the company after it refused to remove restrictions on the use of its products for lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans.
The appeals court said that Anthropic “encodes restrictions into Claude that prevent the model from performing tasks that Anthropic wishes to avoid. On more than one occasion, these restrictions have prevented Claude from performing tasks requested by government users. And recently, a dispute arose over whether contractual prohibitions prohibited the use of Claude in an ongoing military operation overseas, leaving the Department unsure whether Claude would act as necessary and intended.”
The case in the Northern District of California was presided over by Judge Rita Lin, a Biden appointee. Lin determined that the blacklisting violated the First Amendment. “The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,” he wrote.
