The national-security designation the Trump administration applied to Anthropic on February 27 was functionally a procurement decision. The 'supply chain risk' label exists in U.S. law to identify foreign actors embedding hostile code in defense systems; applying it to a domestic AI lab that had simply declined a contract reversed the label's meaning without changing its consequences . Anthropic lost access. Its rivals gained an implicit endorsement. The Pentagon did not need to announce a preferred vendor — it announced an unacceptable one, and the market filled the space.