type: timeline_event
On March 19, 2026, legal scholar Alan Rozenshtein published an influential analysis on Lawfare laying out what he argued was the correct judicial approach to Anthropic's challenge to the Pentagon's supply chain risk designation. Rozenshtein proposed a middle-ground remedy: Judge Rita Lin should block the government-wide ban that prevented Anthropic from selling to any federal agency, and should specifically prohibit the DOD from pressuring defense contractors to sever their own commercial relationships with Anthropic — what Rozenshtein termed a "secondary boycott" — but should allow the government to stop purchasing directly from Anthropic if it chose to do so.
The analysis hinged on a distinction between the government's legitimate authority as a buyer and its illegitimate use of coercive power to exclude a company from the broader marketplace. Rozenshtein argued that Defense Secretary Hegseth's directive had exceeded the statutory authority granted under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act by extending the designation beyond direct government procurement to encompass the entire federal supply chain. The effect was to pressure every company doing business with the government to cut ties with Anthropic — not because those companies had security concerns, but because maintaining a relationship with a blacklisted firm could jeopardize their own government contracts.
The Lawfare piece was widely circulated among legal observers and was expected to influence the framing of arguments at the March 24 hearing. Rozenshtein noted that the secondary boycott dimension of the case had implications far beyond the AI industry: if the government could use supply chain designations to pressure the private sector into severing commercial relationships with disfavored companies, the tool could be weaponized against any industry. The analysis concluded that the court should act quickly to narrow the designation's scope, preserving the government's right to choose its own vendors while preventing the kind of economic coercion that "transforms a procurement decision into a weapon of political control."