In brief
The White House described a recent meeting with Anthropic as 'productive,' focusing on collaboration and safety concerns regarding the company's new AI tool, Claude Mythos, which is designed for advanced cybersecurity tasks. This engagement comes amidst ongoing legal disputes and previous tensions marked by derogatory remarks from the Trump administration.
The White House has said it had a productive and constructive meeting with the head of artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, which is suing the US Department of Defense.
The meeting comes a week after the firm released its Claude Mythos preview, an AI tool that the company claims can outperform humans at some hacking and cyber-security tasks.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei spoke on Friday with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Axios reports.
A representative of Anthropic did not comment on the meeting, which comes two months after the White House derided the firm as a radical left, woke company.
So far, only a few dozen companies have been given access to Mythos, which researchers have said is strikingly capable at computer security tasks.
The tool can find bugs lurking in decades-old code, according to Anthropic, and autonomously find ways to exploit them.
Last week, Amodei said the company had spoken to officials across the US government and offered to work with them.
Friday's meeting is a sign that Anthropic's technology may be too critical for even the US government to do without - despite the Trump administration's tough stance against the firm.
We discussed opportunities for collaboration, as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology, the White House said. The statement added that the meeting had explored the balance between advancing innovation and ensuring safety.
In March, Anthropic took legal action against the defence department and other federal agencies, after the firm was labelled a supply chain risk.
This was the first time a US company had been publicly given the label, which means a technology is not secure enough for government use. Anthropic has been used in high-level government and military work since 2024.
It argued in court that the label was simple retaliation by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, because Amodei had refused to grant the Pentagon unfettered use of its AI tools over fears of Anthropic being used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
While a federal court in California has largely agreed, a federal appeals court has denied the firm's request to temporarily block the supply chain risk designation. Nevertheless, Anthropic's tools are still in use at many of the government agencies that had been using them before the designation, according to court records.
Until Friday, the White House had said little positive about Anthropic. When Trump directed all government agencies to stop using Anthropic, he wrote on social media that the company was run by left wing nut jobs, who were attempting to strong arm defence.
Trump stated, We don't need it, we don't want it, and will not do business with them again! As he arrived for an event in Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday, Trump was asked by reporters about the Anthropic CEO's visit to the White House. The president said he had no idea about the meeting.
