The Trump administration can blacklist AI firm Anthropic from all Pentagon contracts, a federal appeals court ruled Friday, in a decision that expands the executive branch’s authority to designate U.S. businesses as national security risks.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the Defense Department had good reason to conclude that the company’s artificial intelligence products pose a supply chain risk to the department and its contractors because the company includes code in its models that restricts them from performing certain tasks. Anthropic has said that it will not allow its products to be used for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.
“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. “As Anthropic admits, the company encodes restrictions into Claude that prevent the model from performing tasks that Anthropic wishes to prevent.”
But can they label all AI as a national security risk? Anthropic’s only additional crime was not wanting to be involved in weapons development or mass surveillance.
Let’s be clear, not wishing to do physical harm, that is not inherently a security risk; whereas the inverse, AI that will play ball with the Pentagon, and then relying on that AI to pull triggers, that’s an extreme security risk.
I mean no surprise that trump would get it backward.