Cornell Law professor Michael C. Dorf discusses the recent standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon over Anthropic’s refusal to permit its AI tools to be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons, leading the Trump administration to designate Anthropic a national security supply-chain. Professor Dorf argues that while both mass surveillance and autonomous weapons deployment may already be unlawful under the Fourth Amendment and customary international law respectively, Anthropic had sound reasons to seek explicit contractual carveouts rather than rely on those legal limits—and that the Pentagon’s unwillingness to accept those carveouts raises the alarming inference that the administration intends to pursue both activities.