DC Circuit lets Trump blacklist Anthropic as supply chain risk

The dispute runs through two statutes with two very different definitions of supply chain risk. The district court looked at 10 U.S.C. § 3252, where the definition is narrow: it covers only malicious actions by adversaries, and the court read words like 'sabotage,' 'maliciously introduce,' and 'otherwise subvert' as requiring bad motive. On that reading, Anthropic did not qualify. The DC Circuit agreed with that interpretation — and with the finding that Anthropic had no bad motive — but it was reviewing the blacklisting under 41 U.S.C. § 4713, a broader provision Congress paired with exclusive jurisdiction for the appeals court. Under Section 4713, the definition of supply chain risk extends to any person who may extract data or otherwise manipulate covered technology, without the malice requirement. The US designation rested on both statutes, and that dual basis is what let the appeals court reach a different result. The practical question now is whether the narrower Section 3252 ruling survives against a designation also grounded in the more permissive Section 4713 — a matter the appeals court left to the interpretation of the statutes rather than any finding about Anthropic's conduct.