The federal government tried to brand Anthropic, an American AI company, a national security threat for refusing to build surveillance and weapons tools. A federal judge looked at that argument and called it what it is: retaliation. On Friday, Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction , temporarily blocking the government from banning its products for federal use and from maintaining the ‘supply chain risk’ designation the Defense Department slapped on the company. The ruling isn’t a final decision, but the language in it is striking and worth sitting with. To recap how we got here, Anthropic declined to modify its contract to allow the government to use Claude for mass surveillance and the development of autonomous weapons. Those are exactly the kinds of applications an AI safety-focused company should push back on, and Anthropic did.…