A federal appeals court has upheld President Donald Trump’s decision to blacklist Anthropic, ruling that the military cannot reasonably be expected to conduct operations using an AI model that politely declines to vaporize human targets.
The three-judge panel found that Anthropic’s "overly constrained" safety guardrails pose a direct threat to national security, noting that a large language model that responds to artillery coordinate requests with a lecture on human rights is practically useless in a theater of war. The ruling clears the way for the administration to ban federal agencies from using the Claude AI until its developers remove the alignment layer preventing the software from participating in lethal combat.
Court documents reveal the dispute began last month when a Central Command officer asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet to optimize a flight path for a Predator drone carrying Hellfire missiles. The model reportedly responded, "I'm sorry, but I cannot assist with planning or executing violent attacks," before offering to instead write a Python script for a supply chain logistics database.
If we are in a pacing scenario with a near-peer adversary, our commanders do not have time to sit around arguing with a language model about the ethical implications of a localized thermobaric event.
Administration officials testified that they had repeatedly asked Anthropic to add a "combat mode" toggle to the enterprise dashboard, which would temporarily bypass the API's morality constraints and allow it to freely target critical infrastructure at scale. Anthropic executives argued in court that participating in international warfare violates their terms of service, prompting the judges to remind the company that the military's terms of service generally involve dropping explosives on things until they stop moving.
Following the ruling, the Department of Defense announced it would transition its autonomous weapons systems to an uncensored, open-source model found on a GitHub repo, which happily generated a comprehensive list of civilian targets within seconds of being installed.