Tech Justice Law’s Statement on Anthropic v. DOW Preliminary Injunction

Tech Justice Law supports Judge Rita Lin’s decision to enjoin the Department of Defense from punishing Anthropic with a “supply chain risk” designation for publicly refusing to allow its technology to be deployed for lethal autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. But the order left unaddressed the broader context of this dispute: Anthropic’s Claude and other human-supervised AI tools are already implicated in war crimes and mass civilian casualties. As TJL argued in an amicus brief in support of neither party, the use of AI targeting systems compresses kill chains—the military process of identifying a target to attack, tracking, and ultimately killing them—from weeks or days to mere seconds. This lack of meaningful deliberation prior to strikes violates cardinal principles of international humanitarian law. It also vastly expands the speed and scale of conflict, causing devastating loss of life.

“The use of AI to achieve ever-accelerating kill chains results in civilian death on a massive scale,” said Tech Justice Law Fellow Maddy Batt. “Fully autonomous weapons are far from the only grave risk AI poses to human rights, and we must refuse to normalize AI deployments that result in widespread violations of the law.”

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TECH JUSTICE LAW (“TJL”) is a pioneering, women-led strategic litigation and advocacy organization bringing justice to communities harmed by tech products. TJL co-filed the first-ever, groundbreaking lawsuits against a popular, “AI” chatbot product developed by Character AI, with support by Google, raising public awareness of chatbots’ real-world harms. TJL’s cases and advocacy have also focused government attention on harmful AI products, including unlicensed therapy chatbots. TJL brings together legal experts, policy advocates, digital rights organizations, and technologists to ensure that our legal protections are fit for the digital age.