Trump’s Anthropic Ban Is Lawless. Congress Must Respond with a Law.

President Donald Trump and his administration are so dead set on winning the AI arms race they’ve started an all-out, whole-of-government war against America’s current innovation leader, Anthropic. Despite having relied on Anthropic for missions in Venezuela and Iran, with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth calling the company’s technology “exquisite,” Trump and the military have now declared this American company to be a “supply chain risk,” banishing it like a foreign saboteur intent on infiltrating America.

Anthropic is suing the government, arguing that Hegseth’s designation violates the Constitution’s First Amendment protection of speech and the Fifth Amendment’s requirements for due process, and is ultra vires, an unconstitutional bill of attainder and arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion. A hearing is set for today (March 24) before a federal judge in San Francisco.

Whatever the outcome, this messy situation reveals that America needs a national policy to govern transformative AI, particularly when it comes to applications in the military and in the intelligence community. Congress should accept the administration’s March 20 invitation to enact a new AI law. Unfortunately, President Trump’s proposal for a “National AI Legislative Framework” would essentially just preempt most state AI laws without actually advancing substantive protocols for broad AI governance at the federal level.