In her Anthropic ruling, Judge Rita Lin said the'empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics'. In her Anthropic ruling, Judge Rita Lin said the'empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics'. Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic was unlawful, US judge rules Anthropic argued designation as'supply chain risk' could cost the company billions of dollars in lost business and reputational harm A US federal judge ruled Thursday that sanctions imposed in February by the Trump administration against AI giant Anthropic were illegal, finding that the government had punished the artificial intelligence company for publicly criticising the Pentagon. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Judge Rita Lin said in a 59-page decision. She barred the federal agencies named in the lawsuit from enforcing President Donald Trump's order to stop using the tools of Anthropic - creator of the Claude AI models - and overturned defense secretary Pete Hegseth's designation of the company as a "supply chain risk", a status previously reserved for foreign firms.

The concept of using artificial intelligence to help mitigate dull, repetitive or manpower-intensive jobs within government is nothing new. For example, the Post Office has been using AI to scan, route and track letters and packages for several years now. Other agencies are using similar so-called low-level AI for everything from document processing to managing their payroll. Sometimes called robotic process automation, tasking computers with those kinds of jobs makes a lot of sense. A human could do the same repetitive type of job as well, but it would take much longer. And the human would likely get tired at some point and thus be more prone to errors and mistakes. Slowly, however, AI is starting to be asked to perform higher level tasks that are normally undertaken by humans.