A district court judge temporarily blocks the federal ban on Anthropic

A federal judge in California granted Anthropic’s request for a preliminary injunction Thursday, preventing implementation of President Donald Trump’s governmentwide ban on its technology and the Pentagon’s designation of the company as a supply-chain risk. In her decision, San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Rita Lin said the government’s actions appeared to be “designed to punish Anthropic” rather than protect national security. Her order blocks the defendant agencies from carrying out the ban on Anthropic’s technology and halts any Department of Defense actions to implement, apply, or enforce the company’s supply chain risk designation pending the final result of the case or further notice from the court. The ruling, for now, is a win for Anthropic and its supporters. Given the potentially wide-ranging impacts of the litigation, the company has attracted a broad coalition of backers in its legal fight — including industry competitors, federal workers, as well as legal and policy analysts.

The Department of Energy is getting ready to bring on technologists from the governmentwide hiring initiative known as Tech Force, according to an IT official at the agency. Tech Force launched in December as a program trying to fill gaps across federal agencies with workers serving two-year stints. A few agencies have already made selections, the Energy Department technology leader said during a panel at the EIE Summit on Thursday in Washington D.C. Bridget Carper Arnone, deputy CIO for architecture, engineering, technology and innovation with the DOE’s OCIO, said the department hasn’t “started the actual interviews, but they’ve gone through the first level where a crossagency panel has deemed them qualified.” The Energy Department had an initial wishlist of 10 developers, she said, but budget constraints are playing a role. DOE received more than 100 applicants for the software engineering role and around 175 for the data scientist position. The other hurdle for the Energy Department is compliance considerations. Only a certified classification specialist has the authority to approve a position description. Arnone said she used Joulix, the DOE’s generative AI tool suite, to speed up the process of writing the position description and is now waiting on the specialist to classify it.

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