Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was reportedly scheduled to meet Friday with White House chief of staff Susie Wales, following a bitter row in which the Pentagon blacklisted the AI giant and the CEO criticized the Trump administration.
The West Wing meeting was expected at a time when leaders in the United States and abroad were grappling with Anthropic’s Mythos, a new paradigm of artificial intelligence that the company itself says could create widespread disruption online because of its ability to penetrate cybersecurity defenses.
A source close to the talks said: “It would be completely irresponsible for the US government to deprive itself of the technological leaps offered by the new model.” Axios said. “It will be a gift to China.”
The White House meeting comes as Anthropic is in discussions to provide government agencies with advance access to the system, according to The Wall Street Journal. The administration held meetings involving Vice President J.D. Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Besent, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, along with senior executives including Amodei, to coordinate preparations for Mithos.
Instead of a public release, Anthropic unveiled “Project Glasswing,” a plan to share Mythos with a carefully selected group of about 40 companies including Amazon, Apple, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, and Nvidia. They get early access to the model so they can use it to find and fix security flaws.
Anthropic and the White House have sparred for months over safety restrictions.
After the company refused to remove safeguards preventing its AI models from being used to operate autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of Americans, the Pentagon last month labeled the company a supply chain risk — barring it from working with the War Department and blocking contractors from using Anthropic’s AI models in their work with the Pentagon. The White House has directed all federal agencies to abandon Anthropic technology as well.
Meanwhile, Amodei criticized the president in a leaked internal email, accusing the War Department of targeting Anthropic for not giving “dictatorship-style praise to Trump.” The CEO later apologized, as his company fought the blacklist in court.
However, the feds were preparing a version of the Mythos for key agencies. According to Bloomberg. Recent days have seen employees from two large agencies contact Anthropic about integrating Mythos into their cyber defense projects. Politico reported.
The newspaper reported that Anthropic is working with lobbyists with ties to the White House in an attempt to ease tensions.
After being blacklisted, the company hired mega-lobbyist Brian Ballard, the newspaper reported. He has raised more than $50 million for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. The company is working with Carlos Trujillo, a veteran of the first Trump White House as well.
The Pentagon has reached agreements with Anthropic competitors OpenAI and xAI to use their models in classified settings. But security analysts say it could take months before these systems are integrated into operations at the level achieved by Anthropic’s technology.