Anthropic PBC v. United States Department of War
Issue
In *Anthropic PBC v. United States Department of War*, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance Foundation argues that a government-wide federal procurement blacklist issued against a domestic AI company violates the First Amendment when the triggering basis is the company's publicly stated limitations on how its products may be used. The case asks whether the "supply chain risk" designation authority under 41 U.S.C. § 4713 lawfully reaches a domestic contractor's product-use policies articulated during an ordinary contract dispute — or whether applying the statute in that way both misreads its text and penalizes protected speech. The non-obvious difficulty lies in the fact that Anthropic's stated policy positions and its product's functional capabilities may be inseparable, making it genuinely contested whether the government acted as a censor or simply as a contracting officer assessing performance.
What Happened
The Taxpayers Protection Alliance Foundation filed this consent amicus curiae brief on April 22, 2026, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, supporting Petitioner Anthropic PBC's petition for judicial review of a Department of War agency designation under 41 U.S.C. § 4713. TPAF advances three independent grounds for vacating the designation. First, it argues that by extending the blacklist government-wide — reaching agencies including Treasury, State, HHS, and Energy far beyond the original DOW contract — Respondents penalized speech outside the scope of any legitimate program condition, in violation of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine under *AID v. Alliance for Open Society*. Second, it contends that § 4713's operative terms, read through *ejusdem generis* and the *Fischer v. United States* methodology of using surrounding statutory context to cabin broadly worded provisions, do not reach a domestic company asserting product limitations during a contract dispute. Third, TPAF raises a non-delegation challenge, arguing that if § 4713 permits designation on these facts, it supplies no intelligible limiting principle under *Gundy v. United States* and *FCC v. Consumers' Research*.
Why It Matters
This brief is worth watching primarily because of its unconstitutional conditions framing: by grounding the First Amendment claim in the government-wide scope of the ban rather than the original contract dispute, TPAF gives the D.C. Circuit a doctrinal hook — rooted in *Alliance for Open Society* rather than the more government-favorable *Rust v. Sullivan* — that does not require the court to resolve whether an AI company's values statements and its product functionality are legally separable. That question is genuinely open: no court has squarely addressed whether a national-security procurement statute can support a cross-agency blacklist when the designated "risk" is a contractor's public advocacy about permissible uses of its own technology. The statutory misapplication argument, while creative, turns on whether courts will read § 4713's supply-chain-risk authority as limited to intentional adversarial actors — a reading the government can contest — making the First Amendment theory the stronger vehicle for Petitioner's relief.
Related Filings
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