WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump said on April 21 that Anthropic was “shaping up” in the eyes of his administration, opening the door for the AI company to reverse its blacklisting at the Pentagon.
Mr Trump directed the government in February to stop working with Anthropic. The Pentagon followed up by declaring the firm a supply-chain risk, dealing a major blow to the artificial intelligence lab after a showdown over guardrails for how the military could use its AI tools.
The company disputes that it poses a risk and filed suit against the Defense Department in March over the determination.
Anthropic chief executive officer Dario Amodei met with White House officials on April 17 to attempt to repair the relationship. The White House called the meeting productive and constructive.
“They came to the White House a few days ago, and we had some very good talks with them,” Mr Trump told CNBC’s Squawk Box on April 21.
“And I think they’re shaping up. They’re very smart, and I think they can be of great use. I like smart people… I think we’ll get along with them just fine.”
When asked if a deal was on the horizon with the Pentagon, Mr Trump said: “It’s possible. We want the smartest people.”
Anthropic, asked for comment, referred to its April 17 statement describing its White House meeting as productive and focused on how the two “can work together on key shared priorities such as cybersecurity, America’s lead in the AI race, and AI safety”.
The remarks from Mr Trump are the clearest sign yet of a rapprochement between his administration and Anthropic, whose Claude models are highly regarded for coding.
It comes just weeks after Anthropic unveiled Mythos, its most advanced AI tool, with a potentially unprecedented ability to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities and devise ways to exploit them, experts have said.
Anthropic has said Claude Mythos Preview will not be made generally available. Instead, the company announced Project Glasswing, in which it invited major tech companies, cybersecurity vendors and US bank JPMorgan Chase, along with several dozen other organisations, to privately evaluate the model and prepare defences accordingly.
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said last week the firm was discussing its frontier AI model Mythos with the Trump administration without providing details.
Anthropic, which Republican Trump still characterised as employing “the radical left”, in his April 21 comments, ran afoul of the Trump administration after it sought assurances from the Pentagon that its AI tools would not be used to surveil Americans or operate autonomous weapons.
The Pentagon’s ban on Anthropic forbade Defense Department employees and private sector contractors from using the company’s AI tools after a six-month period, though the rule contained important exemptions for national security, Reuters reported.
A Washington, DC, federal appeals court earlier in April declined to block the Pentagon’s national security blacklisting of AI company Anthropic for now, a win for the Trump administration that came after another appeals court came to the opposite conclusion in a separate legal challenge by Anthropic. REUTERS