ANALYSIS:
Dario Amodei, an artificial intelligence founding father, did his duty at President Trump’s White House tech titan summit amid the mogul’s bitter battle with the Pentagon.
Mr. Amodei, who runs Anthropic and its all-knowing Claude AI, wanted to decide when in war the military could and could not turn to his brainy model. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth essentially said commanders run the military, not Mr. Amodei or Claude.
In Silicon Valley’s AI revolution, Anthropic took a clear lead from other models developed by the assembled White House cast of Elon Musk (XAI), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and others. Mr. Amodei seeks a staggering $2 trillion valuation when his colossus goes public, say press reports.
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As Anthropic grows in power and wealth, it is flexing political muscle. The company and employees have given $10 million to candidates and political action committees since its 2021 founding, $9 million of that in 2026 alone, according to a review by The Washington Times of Federal Election Commission (FEC) files. The vast majority of candidate donations go to Democrats.
At the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Amodei repeated his concerns about rogue models doing bad things. One of his researchers told news channels that he quit for fear of AI causing human extinction.
Mr. Amodei added his signature to a voluntary joint statement that stresses self-regulation. He also agreed that the U.S. must win the global AI competition, meaning beat China.
Mr. Trump called Mr. Amodei “fantastic” in a White House driveway press conference. “We all need to work together,” Mr. Amodei said.
But Mr. Amodei for months has been in a legal bare-knuckle faceoff with the administration, which views his team as a possible national security threat.
Mr. Amodei sued the Defense Department (Department of War) and other Cabinet members earlier this year after Mr. Hegseth evicted Claude. He called it a risk to warfighters, not because it might turn villain, but because of the people like Mr. Amodei who invented and operate Claude.
Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s under secretary for technology and research, tells the story in a declaration filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
Mr. Michael accused Anthropic leaders of “adversarial behavior” and “bad faith” as he cited the “behavior of its leaders during talks” to extend their Pentagon contract.
“Anthropic’s demonstrated willingness to interfere with that chain of command is a significant risk,” Mr. Michael stated.
Anthropic does not want its model used to autonomously launch weapons or to surveil Americans. Mr. Hegseth says no weapon is used without an OK from a real live person and that the Pentagon does not spy domestically.
Here are some of Mr. Michael’s blunt criticisms of Anthropic and why it is a risk:
— “The company’s leadership insisted on imposing restrictions on DoW’s lawful military capability development, operations, and intelligence missions, even though it would impair the capabilities of the U.S. military relative to our adversaries. In short, Anthropic made clear that it will not allow the Government to deploy Claude for multiple lawful uses.”
— “It is reasonably likely that Anthropic’s leadership would alter or even shut off DoW’s use of Claude if Anthropic believes that the model may be used for purposes it deems, in its sole discretion, to extend beyond the company’s unilaterally imposed boundaries before or during a military operation, which could endanger the lives of U.S. military personnel and civilians and compromise the United States’ warfighting mission.”
— “The company’s leadership demonstrated bad faith by sharing with the press unclassified but sensitive details of private conversations with DoW leadership in order to exert public pressure on DoW to concede to Anthropic’s demands.”
— The Pentagon does not trust Anthropic’s dealings with China, which gobbles up intel on America.
Mr. Michael said, “Anthropic employs a large number of foreign nationals to build and support its LLM [Large Language Model] products, including many from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which increases the degree of adversarial risk should those employees comply with the PRC’s National Intelligence Law. Although other major U.S. AI labs that provide LLM products to DoW may present similar risks, the technical and security assurances of the other labs’ leadership, along with their consistently responsible and trustworthy behavior during their engagement with DoW, mitigate these risks. Anthropic’s case, however, is different.”
The Justice Department was just as blunt in its court filing.
“AI systems are acutely vulnerable to manipulation, and Anthropic could attempt to disable its technology or preemptively alter the behavior of its model either before or during ongoing war fighting operations, if Anthropic — in its discretion — feels that its corporate ’red lines’ are being crossed.”
The filing disclosed that Anthropic has already objected to certain Claude uses, presumably in the war against Iran.
Such events led the Pentagon to conclude it “cannot trust Anthropic to ensure the integrity of its models.”
The so-called “doomers” on social media express fears of an out-of-control AI destroying the world. The Trump team fears out-of-control Anthropic humans could cause “disastrous action that would put our war fighters’ lives in danger.”
The Times’s review of FEC records shows a big majority of Anthropic employee donations go to Democrats and PACs such as ActBlue. Google AI puts the 2026 candidate ratio at 68.8% Democrats and 12.9% Republicans.
Daniela Amodei, Anthropic president, co-founder and sister of Dario, contributed to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign.
In the court battle, not surprisingly, District Court Judge Rita F. Lin, a Biden appointee, sided with Anthropic in August.
But on Sept. 25, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia backed the Pentagon’s right to blacklist Anthropic.
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