Judge Rita Lin didn't mince words. The Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk was "baseless and illegal," she wrote, and national security is "not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics." The order came down Friday in the Northern District of California. It finds that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority when he told military contractors to stop doing business with the company. The move, the judge held, violated Anthropic's First Amendment rights — retaliation dressed up as risk management, driven by a desire to make a public example of the firm. This is the fight that's been simmering since February, when the company refused a Pentagon contract that would have overridden its own limits on how Claude gets used. It drew two hard lines — no lethal autonomous weapons, no domestic mass surveillance — and the blacklist followed. The government is expected to appeal, and a separate, narrower case is still pending in the D.C. Circuit. But for now the designation is vacated. If you were tracking this because your own procurement chain touches Anthropic, the immediate blocker is gone.