Two Courts Split On Anthropic's Government Access
Two Courts, One Company
Anthropic wants two things at once this month: durable, lawful access to the U.S. government's contracting budget, and a public listing priced around $2 trillion with its founders still in charge. On September 25, one of those got harder. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 that the Pentagon was within its rights to label Anthropic a 'supply chain risk' back in March 2026, a designation that functions as a soft blacklist: agencies can technically still buy Anthropic's Claude models, but the label puts a target on any contracting officer who tries. Judge Gregory Katsas wrote the majority opinion. The trigger for the designation was specific: Anthropic refused a Pentagon request to strip Claude's guardrails against two uses, autonomous weapons targeting and mass-surveillance applications, features the company has never shipped for anyone. So the same guardrails that make Claude harder to weaponize are the reason it got tagged as a national-security risk to buy from, and the appeals court just said the government's side of it holds up in court.
The Other Ruling Stands
Four weeks before the D.C. Circuit ruled, on August 28, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco ruled the opposite way on a different, related federal action against Anthropic: a broader, governmentwide ban on doing business with the company, plus a specific order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth barring military contractors from working with Anthropic at all. Judge Lin found that action was unlawful retaliation and a due-process violation, citing the unconstitutional-conditions doctrine, which bars the government from using a discretionary benefit like a contracting relationship to punish a company for a policy disagreement by dressing it up as a security judgment. The two cases are not the same lawsuit at two stages of appeal. They are two different federal actions against the same company, decided by two different courts twenty-eight days apart, reaching opposite conclusions about whether the government can use national-security language to keep Anthropic out of its own market. Neither side has taken either ruling to the next court up yet. Until one does, both verdicts are true at the same time: the Pentagon-specific designation is lawful, and the broader ban and Hegseth's order are not.
Same Day, Different Bet
Anthropic didn't pause for any of this. On the same day the D.C. Circuit ruled, September 25, the company asked its own shareholders to approve giving Dario Amodei and six co-founders combined 50.1 percent voting control through a dual-class share structure, ahead of an IPO now being talked about around $2 trillion, up from a $1.5 trillion mark on the secondary market just weeks earlier. That same day, Anthropic also signed a seven-year, $11.6 billion cloud compute deal with Akamai, committing the company to a compute pipeline that runs through 2033. And in the same set of disclosures, Anthropic said the blacklist fight has already cost it 'billions of dollars' in lost business. Anthropic is betting its own money and its founders' control on a growth story that assumes the government relationship gets fixed, while the only two courts to rule on that relationship this year disagree about whether it's fixable at all. The people who feel that gap first are the investors being asked to wire money into the $2 trillion round this quarter, pricing in a government contracting pipeline no court has actually cleared.
Both rulings stand. The D.C. Circuit says the Pentagon's supply-chain-risk label is lawful; Judge Lin's ruling that the broader governmentwide ban was illegal retaliation still stands too, unreversed and unappealed as of this week. On August 29, two separate fights over Anthropic's government access were still pending; one just got an answer, the other hasn't. Anthropic is pricing a $2 trillion IPO before either side takes this further. The verdict: believe the $11.6 billion Akamai compute bet; the government-contracting math stays unresolved until Anthropic or the government appeals the D.C. Circuit ruling.
Sources
- US appeals court upholds Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic (spokesman.com)
- Court rules Trump can blacklist Anthropic for refusing to enable Claude features (arstechnica.com)
- Judge blocks Pentagon blacklist of Anthropic (cnbc.com)
- Judge says the Pentagon can't designate AI company Anthropic a supply chain risk (npr.org)
- Anthropic's founders seek voting control ahead of IPO (techcrunch.com)
- Anthropic to pay Akamai $11.6 billion over seven years in cloud deal (techcrunch.com)