Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is reportedly back at the negotiating table with the Defense Department in an effort to save the company’s relationship with the U.S. military and prevent it from being forced out of defense work due to having a “supply chain risk.” Talks between the two sides broke down on Friday after weeks of a bitter public feud over the startup’s refusal to give the Pentagon unrestricted access to its AI, as rivals like OpenAI tried to fill the void.
Amodei is in talks with Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael about a new contract that will allow the U.S. military to continue using Anthropic’s cloud AI models. according to financial TimesCiting unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter. michael Amodei was attacked on social media Last week, amid a tense standoff over acceptable military use of AI, the executive was called a “liar” with a “God-complex” and accused of “endangering the security of our country.”
Securing a new deal could be a matter of survival for American startups. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Friday he would designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, a category usually reserved for companies tied to foreign governments that pose a national security risk to the United States. This designation will have an impact on the entire US technology ecosystem, forcing companies to abandon the cloud and sever ties with the company if they want to continue working on defense contracts.
A newly leaked memo sent by Amodei to Anthropic staff on Friday was first reported Information and also viewed by footThat’s likely to inflame already strained relations between the company and the Trump administration. In it, Amodei reportedly criticized OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon as “security theater” and described the messaging from both sides as “straight up lies.”
Amodei suggested that Anthropic’s relationship with the federal government has soured because, unlike OpenAI or its executives, “we have not donated to Trump” and “we have not given dictator-style praise to Trump.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is one of several Silicon Valley veterans who have been cozying up to the transactional president since returning to office, and co-founder Greg Brockman, also OpenAI’s longtime chairman, is a Trump mega-donor.
In the memo, Amodei also said that the Defense Department was close to accepting Anthropic’s terms:
“At the end of the conversation (the department) offered to accept our current terms if we removed a specific phrase about ‘analysis of bulk acquired data,’ which was the single line in the contract that exactly matched the scenario we were most concerned about. We found that very suspicious.”
Anthropic’s ugly dispute with the Pentagon centers around the Defense Department’s insistence on carte blanche access to the company’s technology and the startup’s refusal to compromise on its two red lines for military use: no mass surveillance of Americans and no lethal autonomous weapons, AI systems with the power to kill without human oversight. Hegseth has insisted that the AI technology used by the department should be available for “any legitimate use”, terms Anthropic has refused to accept amid concerns of crossing these red lines. xAI and OpenAI have Allegedly Agreed to those terms.
