Anthropic filed two federal lawsuits against the Trump administration on Monday, challenging a Pentagon decision to designate the artificial intelligence company a "supply chain risk" that its executives warn could cost it multiple billions of dollars in 2026 revenue and cause irreversible reputational damage.

The lawsuits, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California and the US Court of Appeals in Washington DC, follow the Pentagon's formal blacklisting of Anthropic last Thursday – the first time the designation, historically reserved for foreign adversaries, has been used against an American company. The action requires defence vendors and contractors to certify they do not use Anthropic's Claude models in Pentagon-related work.

Anthropic's chief financial officer, Krishna Rao, said in a federal court filing that the consequences could be severe across the company's entire business. "Adjusting for how likely any given customer is to take a maximal reading, the government's actions could reduce Anthropic's 2026 revenue by multiple billions of dollars," Rao said, adding that any damage would be "almost impossible to reverse".

The dispute centres on Anthropic's refusal to grant the Department of Defense unrestricted access to Claude across all lawful purposes. The company has insisted on prohibiting use of its technology for fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance of Americans, a position that drew the hostility of defence secretary Pete Hegseth, who threatened to punish Anthropic if it did not accept all lawful uses of Claude.

Thiyagu Ramasamy, Anthropic's head of public sector, said in a separate filing that the designation had already begun destroying commercial relationships beyond defence. "The designation impugns Anthropic's integrity and reputation as a trusted partner, having a real but incalculable effect on sales to non-governmental customers," Ramasamy said, warning that projected public sector annual recurring revenue of more than half a billion dollars in 2026 could disappear entirely if defence contractors severed ties.

Chief commercial officer Paul Smith detailed specific losses already materialising: a partner holding a multi-million-dollar contract switched from Claude to a rival model for a Food and Drug Administration deployment, eliminating an anticipated revenue pipeline of more than $100 million, while negotiations with financial institutions worth roughly $180 million combined have been disrupted.

The company, backed by Alphabet's Google and Amazon and valued at $380 billion, said it remained committed to national security work. An Anthropic spokesperson told CNBC that "seeking judicial review does not change our longstanding commitment to harnessing AI to protect our national security, but this is a necessary step to protect our business, our customers and our partners."

The Pentagon declined to comment on the litigation. President Donald Trump last month directed federal agencies to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, though he granted the Pentagon six months to comply given Claude's deep integration into classified military systems.

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