Judges to decide if Pete Hegseth's retreat from 'demonstrably false premise' should doom textbook retaliation campaign

Source: Law & Crime

May 16th, 2026, 8:22 am


Pete Hegseth has drawn the right D.C. Circuit panel for seeking deference to his "considered national-security judgment" in the coming week, but the so-called "WOKE" AI developer he designated a "supply-chain risk" says the defense secretary should not be rewarded for his telling "retreat."

Law&Crime has covered how federal judges have blocked various Hegseth's actions as violative of the First Amendment. In one of those cases, Anthropic persuaded a California judge in March that Hegseth engaged in an apparent act of "classic illegal First Amendment retaliation."

Hegseth blasted the Pentagon contractor's CEO Dario Amodei for "sanctimonious rhetoric," issued a far-reaching "directive" banning other military contractors from doing business with Anthropic that had "no legal effect," and designated Anthropic a "supply-chain risk" for its insistence that Claude "cannot safely or reliably be used for autonomous lethal warfare and mass surveillance of Americans.". That same month, Anthropic separately filed a petition with the D.C. Circuit.

The filing asked the appellate court to review Hegseth's determination that the company poses a national security risk. That determination, Anthropic says, was an unconstitutional and "pretextual form of retaliation" — and an "abuse of discretion" that exceeded Hegseth's authority under the law.

Read more: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/judges-to-decide-if-pete-hegseths-retreat-from-demonstrably-false-premise-should-doom-textbook-retaliation-campaign/

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Full headline - Judges to decide if Pete Hegseth's 'retreat' from 'demonstrably false premise' should doom 'textbook retaliation' campaign

Link to FILING (PDF) - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cadc.42923/gov.uscourts.cadc.42923.01208849633.0.pdf