Anthropic resumes Pentagon talks as CEO Dario Amodei makes ‘last-ditch’ bid to avoid supply chain ban: Report

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is making a last-ditch attempt to negotiate a deal with the US Defense Department after the company was blacklisted by the federal government last week, reported the Financial Times.

The report says Amodei has been holding talks with Emil Michael, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, with the aim of finalizing a contract granting Pentagon's access to Anthropic's AI models.

Notably, Michael had recently called Amodei a “liar” with a “god complex” in a post on X last week.

“It’s a shame that @DarioAmodei is a liar and has a God-complex," he wrote. He added, “He wants to play God and make new 'law' and...really stupid laws at that. We never asked for guardrails to be taken out (lie!). We agreed to human oversight of all weapons systems."

Notably, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the US would designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, a designation that is usually reserved for foreign adversarial companies.

Anthropic said that it would contest that claim in court. The company said talks with the Pentagon broke down after it set two conditions for the use of Claude in military applications: no mass domestic surveillance and no use for fully autonomous weapons.

Why did Anthropic's talks with Pentagon fail?

In an internal memo to the staff, Amodei reportedly described the reason why the talks with the Pentagon broke down, saying, “Near the end of the negotiation the [department] offered to accept our current terms if we deleted a specific phrase about ‘analysis of bulk acquired data’, which was the single line in the contract that exactly matched this scenario we were most worried about. We found that very suspicious.”

Amodei also noted that Anthropic has been frozen out of the discussions because “we haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump”. The Anthropic CEO also claimed that much of the messaging by the Pentagon and OpenAI was “just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them”.

Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the US government last year for the deployment of its AI models in classified settings, becoming the first company to do so. However, last week, US President Donald Trump lashed out at the company for what he termed ‘selfish’ behaviour and went on to blacklist the AI startup from the federal government.

“The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY,” Trump wrote.

While Trump added that the US government will not do business with Anthropic again, a report just days later suggested that the Pentagon had used Anthropic's AI model during the recent strikes in Iran. The company's AI was also reportedly last used during the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.