Upcoming Office Hours - Emergency Powers Without Emergency (Thursday, March 19, 2:00 PM ET)
The Anthropic Dispute and the Expansion of National Security Authority
Tomorrow, we will host our latest ISSE Office Hours—our ongoing series of conversations with readers, members of our research community, and invited experts—focused on the evolving landscape of executive authority across legal, political, and institutional domains, and the ways in which exceptional powers are invoked, adapted, and embedded within ordinary governance.
We are pleased to be joined by Michel Paradis, a lawyer at Steptoe LLP, with extensive experience in appellate litigation, technology law, and international and national security law. Michel also teaches at Columbia University, including courses on national security law, international law, and constitutional law, and a new course called “Law of Artificial Intelligence.” Michel’s work spans both practice and scholarship, and he has a longstanding interest in the legal and theoretical foundations of emergency powers. He is also the author of Last Mission to Tokyo, on war crimes prosecutions in the Pacific after World War II, and a forthcoming biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The Situation
Over the past several weeks, the U.S. Department of Defense has taken the extraordinary step of designating the AI company Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk,” effectively banning its systems from use across defense networks and initiating a phased removal from sensitive government environments. That designation is now being challenged in court.
The dispute reportedly arose after Anthropic declined to modify certain safeguards on its models—limitations related to surveillance and autonomous military use—prompting escalating pressure from the government. Among the measures reportedly considered were invocation of the Defense Production Act (DPA) to compel cooperation, before ultimately turning to the supply-chain designation.
While neither of these authorities is formally an “emergency power” in the legal sense, both operate within a familiar logic: urgency, national security necessity, and expanded executive discretion over private-sector activity.
Why This Matters
For ISSE, this episode raises a set of questions that sit squarely within our core inquiry:
When does a permanent national-security authority begin to function like an emergency power?
Are we witnessing the expansion of “emergency-like” governance tools into domains—such as AI—previously governed by market and regulatory norms?
What happens when the state seeks to shape or compel the development of foundational technologies in the name of national security?
And critically: who decides the permissible uses of such technologies—the state, the courts, or the companies themselves?
The Defense Production Act, though not tied to a declared emergency, has historically been deployed in moments of perceived crisis or strategic urgency. Similarly, supply-chain risk designations—once primarily associated with foreign adversary technologies—are now being applied in ways that extend into domestic technological ecosystems.
Taken together, these developments suggest a possible shift: Not the declaration of a formal state of exception, but the diffusion of exceptional logic across ordinary governance tools.
Discussion with Michel Paradis
In this session, we will explore both the legal dimensions of the Anthropic litigation and the broader structural implications for executive authority.
With Michel, we will examine:
The legal basis and vulnerabilities of the supply-chain risk designation
The scope and limits of the Defense Production Act in emerging technology contexts
How courts may approach disputes involving national security and private AI systems
The extent to which these tools reflect a broader migration of exceptional powers into ordinary regulatory frameworks
We are particularly interested in bridging doctrinal analysis with theoretical perspectives—including those that have shaped ISSE’s work on the normalization of emergency powers.
Please Join Us
Thursday, March 19
2:00 PM Eastern Time
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/zkx-nmmp-zqy
Or dial: (US) +1 478-308-5145 PIN: 889 071 625#
Or use: https://tel.meet/zkx-nmmp-zqy?pin=8806590102193
At ISSE, we are interested not only in moments where emergency powers are explicitly invoked, but also in the quieter ways in which their logic persists, adapts, and embeds itself within the ordinary architecture of governance.
This discussion offers an opportunity to examine one such moment as it unfolds in real time.
Interesting. I look forward to it.