Anthropic and the Pentagon are back at the negotiating table, the FT reports

According to The Financial Times, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is back at the negotiating table with the US Department of Defense after Friday’s breakdown in talks over the use of the company’s AI tools by the military.

Amode is in talks with Defense Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michel in a last-ditch effort to reach an agreement on rules governing the Pentagon’s access to Anthropic’s cloud models, the Times reported, citing anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter.

Discussions broke down on Friday with President Donald Trump directing federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s equipment and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth saying he would designate the company a supply-chain risk to national security.

Last week, Michael attacked Amodei, calling him a “liar” with a “God complex” in an ex post.

Agreeing to the new deal would enable the US military to continue using Anthropic’s technology, which has reportedly been used in Washington’s war with Iran.

A $200 million contract awarded by the DoD to Anthropic became the first major prototype of the cloud deployed on government classified networks, but the company later sought guarantees that its devices would not be used in domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. The Pentagon had demanded that the military be allowed to use the technology for any legitimate use.

In a Friday memo seen by the FT, Amode told staff that towards the end of talks with the Defense Department, it offered to accept Anthropic’s terms if they deleted a specific phrase about “analysis of massively acquired data” – “exactly matched to this scenario”, he said.

Messaging from the Pentagon and OpenAI, which struck a new deal with the Defense Department on Friday, “directly lies about these issues or attempts to obfuscate them,” Amode wrote in his note.

The timing of OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon, announced just hours after the White House denounced Anthropic, led to a public backlash, with ChatGPT seeing a surge in app uninstalls while the cloud app saw a surge in downloads.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman later said his company “shouldn’t rush” its deal and outlined revisions to its own safeguards for how the Defense Department could use its technology.

In a post on X, Altman further addressed the controversy, saying: “In my conversations over the weekend, I reiterated that Anthropic should not be designated as a (supply chain risk) and we hope that we (the Department of Defense) give them the same terms that we agreed to.”

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff and researchers who left the organization after disagreements over its direction, marketing the company as a “security-first” alternative.

Anthropic has been criticized for months by government officials for being overly concerned about AI safety.

A tech industry group that includes Nvidia, Google and Anthropic sent a letter to Hegseth on Wednesday expressing concern about designating the US company as a supply-chain risk.

The Defense Department and Anthropic did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on their reported negotiations.