Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War
Issue
In *Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War*, amicus curiae Professor Simona Grossi argues that three Executive Branch actions—a Presidential Directive, the Hegseth Directive, and a supply-chain risk designation—constitute unconstitutional First Amendment retaliation and viewpoint discrimination against Anthropic PBC. The legal question is whether the government's use of procurement exclusions and regulatory pressure against a company that publicly refused to permit its AI systems to be used in autonomous lethal weapons or mass-surveillance applications amounts to impermissible punishment of protected speech. The case requires the court to determine how First Amendment retaliation doctrine applies when the government acts not through direct speech restrictions but through the levers of federal contracting and supply-chain risk designation.
What Happened
Professor Simona Grossi of Loyola Law School, represented by Fenwick & West LLP, filed this 20-page amicus brief (Doc. 201) in support of Plaintiff Anthropic PBC's Motion for Summary Judgment, with a hearing set for July 30, 2026 before Hon. Rita F. Lin in the Northern District of California. The brief argues that all three elements of a First Amendment retaliation claim under *Arizona Students' Ass'n* are satisfied, and that the government's use of ecosystem-wide exclusion rather than simple non-renewal reveals retaliatory motive. It separately advances an indirect-coercion theory under *NRA v. Vullo* and *Backpage.com v. Dart*, contending the government cannot accomplish through procurement pressure what it cannot do by direct censorship. The brief draws analogies to recent injunctions protecting law firms *Perkins Coie* and *Jenner & Block* from Executive retaliation, treating Anthropic's contractual refusal as equally protected expressive conduct. Most distinctively, the brief proposes a novel three-part "expressive intermediary" framework that would require clear statutory authority under the major-questions canon, burden-shifting upon a showing of viewpoint-linked pattern and dependency, and heightened scrutiny rejecting bare national-security invocations.
Why It Matters
The proposed "expressive intermediary" framework is the brief's most significant doctrinal contribution: if adopted, it would substantially constrain Executive Branch flexibility to impose use-case conditions on AI vendors as a matter of procurement policy, extending the major-questions canon into First Amendment coercion doctrine in a way no appellate court has yet done. The indirect-coercion argument under *Vullo* is more conventionally grounded but still represents a meaningful extension, as *Vullo* itself did not address the government's broad contracting authority or national-security procurement contexts. The brief's central weakness—one worth watching as the government prepares its opposition—is its complete silence on *Rust v. Sullivan* and the government's likely argument that supply-chain risk conditions in AI-weapons procurement reflect genuinely viewpoint-neutral national-security equities, a gap that could prove decisive at summary judgment.
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