Recently, Anthropic filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration after its AI product, Claude, was labeled as a supply chain risk. Following the lawsuit, Cato joined a brief supporting Anthropic. Thomas Berry, the Director of the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, details why Cato filed in support of Anthropic, writing in part:

The Defense Department punished Anthropic because Anthropic refused to change its algorithm and jettison its guidelines to produce outcomes of the Pentagon’s choosing. The Pentagon’s decision to punish Anthropic for its refusal to deploy Claude to match the Pentagon’s policy preferences constitutes retaliation against protected speech.

A new blog post from Jennifer Huddleston, senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute, details how this action by the Trump administration violates free market principles and the First Amendment, writing in part:

Whether you agree or disagree with Anthropic’s concerns about potential abuse if it were to remove the safeguards, the underlying fact pattern of the Pentagon’s retaliation over its refusal to remove them should concern you. The Pentagon gave a private company a choice: change your product to meet our demands or face being largely blacklisted. Such a choice is an affront to the values enshrined in the First Amendment and those that the US has represented as a free society.

View Huddleston’s previous work on Anthropic:

To speak with either Berry or Huddleston about Anthropic’s lawsuit against the Trump administration, contact Cato PR at pr@​cato.​org.