“Appeals court sides with Trump admin in Anthropic blacklisting”, 25 September 2026 (Photo via The Hill — the original report)
As it ran on the front
On August 28, a federal judge did what federal judges do: read the government's case, checked it against the law, and ruled that the Department of War's designation of Anthropic as a national security risk was illegal. Anthropic had sued back in March over the designation. Anthropic won. That should have settled it — a plaintiff, a bad label, a court order to take the label off.
It did not settle it. Six days later, on September 3, the Pentagon told the world the label was staying. Undersecretary of War Emil Michael put it on the record himself: "Anthropic is still a designated Supply Chain Risk at the Department of War and for the Defense Industrial Base." He signed off with the president's name attached. The designation stayed up anyway. For the next three weeks, those two facts sat next to each other — one true in a courtroom, one true on a Pentagon supply-chain document — and only the second one governed what happened to Anthropic.…
…(cont) Then, on September 25, the D.C. Circuit made the second fact the only one that counted. The appeals court sided with the administration, reversed the district judge, and restored the Pentagon's authority to call Anthropic a risk. CBS News covered the reversal the next morning as a supply-chain story, which it is. It is also a story about arithmetic: an agency ignored a court order for three weeks, and a higher court then confirmed the agency had been right to ignore it.
You do not need an opinion on Anthropic's actual risk profile to see the shape of this. A company sues, and wins. The agency it sued keeps doing the exact thing the court just told it to stop doing, in writing, with a name attached. Weeks pass. A higher court erases the ruling that was being ignored, and the ignoring simply stops being a problem, because there is nothing left on the books that it violated. Anthropic's position on the actual list never moved — not in August, not in September, not for one day of the litigation. Only the paperwork's legal status moved: illegal on the 28th, defied on the 3rd, legal again by the 25th.
This isn't really a story about artificial intelligence policy. It's a story about what a district court order is worth to an agency with the lawyers and the calendar to outlast it. The Pentagon didn't need to win on appeal to get what it wanted. It needed three weeks. The appeals court just made the three weeks retroactively fine.
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“The Pentagon got caught breaking the law, told the judge no thanks, and kept right on going for three weeks — and when the appeals court finally caught up, it just agreed with the Pentagon instead of the law. That's not a legal system working, that's a clock the government knows how to run out. Any agency watching just learned the losing move is free as long as you can out-wait the ruling.”
“Look, the Pentagon followed the process — you lose at the district level, you appeal, that's the system working exactly as designed, and they won, didn't they? Emil Michael wasn't defying a court order, he was just restating the department's position while the matter was still, ah, being litigated. Did I say "while it was being litigated"? A judge had already ruled that position illegal at that point. Okay, that one doesn't land the way I wanted it to.”
{beacon} Technology Technology The Big Story Appeals court sides with Pentagon on Anthropic blacklisting The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with the Trump administration in its blacklisting of the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, allowing the Pentagon to label the AI firm a supply chain risk.
The growing concerns over the safety of artificial intelligence and the speed of its development have many calling for government regulation. Recently, President Trump said he plans to appoint an adviser and create an AI force. J.B.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
