Congressional Democrats are vowing to contest the Trump administration’s unprecedented actions against the artificial intelligence giant Anthropic PBC, which include a prohibition on all use in the federal government and by Pentagon contractors.

Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, vowed to “pull out all the stops” to fight back after Anthropic was barred by President Donald Trump from all government business, and said he plans to seek bipartisan backing for legislation to address the issue.

Anthropic has said AI models were not yet reliable enough for autonomous weapons systems and also objected to using its technology to power mass surveillance of Americans, even if doing so might technically be legal.

“I’m going to use every opportunity to try to undo the damage that he did to AI over the last couple of days,” Wyden said of Trump.

Representative Sam Liccardo, a California Democrat whose district includes a significant portion of Silicon Valley, said the debate over ground rules for deployment of AI technology shouldn’t be happening behind closed doors between one company and one federal entity.

“There’s a reason why there ought to be a public discussion because it’s going to impact all of us certainly when we’re talking about like public surveillance,” Liccardo said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Monday.

Although in the minority, Senate Democrats’ votes will be needed to extend expiring surveillance and other authorities as well as to pass future defense spending and authorization bills.

Wyden predicted some conservatives would also join the effort, given what he expected would be bipartisan concerns about widespread surveillance and allowing machines to make decisions on killing.

“This is so breathtakingly wrong that I think we’ll have support across the political spectrum,” he said.

Anthropic has already vowed to fight in court an order declaring it a supply chain risk barring all commercial work with companies contracting with the Pentagon, issued in a post by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on X Friday night in which he insisted that Trump, and not tech executives, will control the operational decisions of the military.

“Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,” Hegseth said.

Liccardo said he would be introducing a proposed addition to the Cold War-era law known as the Defense Production Act that would bar federal agencies from retaliating against companies like Anthropic for seeking reasonable limits on government use of their technology.

“Technology is an obviously a wonderful thing, we know it has enormous risks we ought to take the cues from industry when industry tells us ‘these risks are too great, let’s draw lines,’” Liccardo added.

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(With assistance from Michael Shepard and Caroline Hyde.)

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