Upholding the Human Bar: FFTN’s Amicus Brief on the Anthropic v. DoW Case

Can the United States government seek to destroy a company for keeping faith with its conscience?

That question is now before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. On April 22, 2026, the Faith Family Technology Network (FFTN) filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War, No. 26-1049.

We filed as Jews, Christians, and Muslims (and more, as FFTN is multi-faith as well as bipartisan).

Our doctrines may differ. The ground we filed to defend does not. Some obligations are higher than any human authority. Our traditions have said so for millennia. The First Amendment has said so for centuries. We believe this is one of those moments when both must be heard.

On the surface, the dispute is technical. The Department of War designated an American AI company a "supply-chain risk," a label historically reserved for firms under foreign adversarial control, and directed federal agencies to cease doing business with it. Anthropic is based in San Francisco. The company has committed no crime. Its only offense was the refusal to remove two limits from its usage policy: one prohibiting the use of its technology for fully autonomous weapons, and one prohibiting its use for mass domestic surveillance of American citizens.

The questions at the heart of this case are older than the technology. They are among the oldest questions humankind has ever faced. When may a life be taken, and by whose hand? When does watching become an intrusion on the inner life where conscience lives? Every civilization has wrestled with them. Every faith has answered them. We bring ancient wisdom to this moment because the stakes demand something old enough to carry them.

On Freedom of Conscience

Our brief begins where the American experiment started: with the freedom of conscience.

James Madison called conscience "unalienable" in his Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785. Thomas Jefferson, in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom the following year, called efforts to compel conduct against belief "sinful and tyrannical." The First Amendment enshrined the principle. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act reinforced it. And from Cantwell to Girouard, the Supreme Court has held, again and again, that the state may not force a person or institution to speak, act, or participate in what their conscience forbids.

The government's position is that Anthropic must support "all lawful purposes." Our brief argues that law sets a minimum. Conscience reaches for a higher bar. A physician may decline to assist a lawful execution. A lawyer may withdraw from a client whose conduct she finds repugnant. An engineer is bound to the safety of the public, and that duty does not collapse into the text of a regulation. Each of these professions carries forward what every faith tradition teaches in its own voice. The Apostle Paul: "All things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial" (1 Corinthians 10:23). Jewish halakha recognizes the duty to act lifnim mishurat hadin, beyond the letter of the law itself. Islamic jurisprudence, in the famous hadith of Nu'man ibn Bashir, teaches that between the clearly lawful and the clearly unlawful lie equivocal matters, and whoever guards against them protects his faith and his dignity.

Religious traditions show us ethical behavior goes beyond moral minimums, and ask us to meet the human bar always (and when we can, the Divine bar on top of that). This decision by the Department of War would turn conscientious refusal into insubordination, and every moral limit into a risk to be managed out of existence.

Human Life Demands Human Judgment

Every tradition represented in our coalition holds that human life is sacred. Genesis teaches that humankind is made in the image of God, b'tselem Elohim in Hebrew, imago Dei in Latin. The Qur'an declares that to save one soul is to save humanity entire (5:32). The rabbis of the Mishnah say the same. Because life is sacred, the taking of it is the gravest act a person or a state can undertake. It requires, at minimum, a conscience capable of mercy, a mind capable of remorse, and a human being who can stand accountable before God and community for what was done.

An algorithm cannot meet this standard. It cannot feel the weight of its target's humanity. It cannot choose mercy when mercy is warranted. It cannot be tried, convicted, or held to answer in any meaningful way for a war crime. To delegate lethal force to a system that cannot bear these burdens is, as our brief puts it, "the eradication of the moral friction that our traditions regard as essential to the just exercise of force." The pause before the trigger. The catch in the throat. These are precisely what keep the lawful use of force human.

Our traditions all recognize that force may sometimes be justified in defense of the innocent. Even so, the decision must rest with a person who can answer for it. The Department of Defense itself once said as much. Directive 3000.09 requires that autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems be designed to "allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force." A company asking the state to honor that principle preserves the moral architecture on which any just use of force must rest.

The Soil in Which Religion Grows

Authentic religious life cannot survive under the permanent gaze of the state. Catholic confession depends on the seal of the confessional. Torah study is premised on communal debate free from external coercion. Islam, from the Qur'an's direct injunction ("Do not spy on one another," 49:12) to its jurists' reflections on the dignity of private affairs, teaches the same. Privacy is the soil in which conscience grows. Strip the soil, and the plant dies.

History teaches what becomes of communities of faith when that principle is forgotten. For fifteen years, the FBI's COINTELPRO program surveilled civil rights leaders, religious organizations, and political dissidents. Its most infamous target was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose home and office were subjected to break-ins and planted listening devices in a sustained effort to neutralize his leadership. After September 11, the NYPD systematically mapped Muslim neighborhoods, photographed mosques, and planted informants in sermons, treating Muslim identity itself as a security threat. Muslim Americans have described the climate of insecurity, fear, and suspicion that followed them into the very places they gathered to pray.

AI does not invent surveillance. It industrializes it. Modern systems can deanonymize individuals from their writing patterns alone, capture and evaluate communications at scale, identify both a speaker and their religious community with startling precision, and recommend targets for further monitoring. A company's principled refusal to build such tools is an act of civic responsibility, recognized by faith communities who know, in their bones, what pervasive surveillance feels like.

A Measured Claim

Our brief is narrow, and we want to be honest about its limits.

We are not arguing that any company may invoke "conscience" to escape any regulation. Laws protecting children from predation, preventing human trafficking, or restraining abusive content deserve obedience. The territory our brief defends is precise: the principled refusal to build tools for autonomous killing and mass domestic surveillance, the two specific domains in which every major faith tradition has staked a claim for millennia.

Nor are we defending any company's commercial interest, nor endorsing every decision Anthropic has made, nor pretending that those who exercise conscience always do so perfectly. As we put it in our Statement on Moral Guardrails in Artificial Intelligence: when the actions of private companies fundamentally contradict the laws of God, we will always stand for the efforts of the state, however imperfect, to restrain them. When the state does the same, we will stand by the rights of conscience, however imperfect are those who exercise them.

The Witness We Are Called To

The faith traditions gathered in this brief have survived empires, inquisitions, and revolutions. They have survived by insisting, quietly, stubbornly, often at unthinkable cost, that some obligations are higher than any human authority.

The right of conscience. The sanctity of human life. The privacy in which religious life must breathe. These belong to the moral foundations on which free societies rest, and no procurement schedule can negotiate them away.

Oral argument is scheduled for May 19, 2026. Whatever the Court decides, our witness does not depend on the outcome. We will continue to do what our traditions have always asked of us: to speak plainly, to stand with conscience wherever we find it, and to remind the powers of this world, with all the patience our traditions have taught us, that law establishes a minimum, and that moral responsibility reaches higher.