Fortune52%
At the heart of Anthropic’s clashes with the U.S. government, a decision not to play by the new rules of Trump’s Washington 53%
By Jeremy Kahn46%
6/30/2026, 1:42:31 PM
Keywords: Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Dario Amodei, David Sacks, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, Openai, Tech Regulation, Tim Cook
BS Summary: This article contains 37 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Biased Writer Voice, and Appeal to Authority, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 15.1% saturation with 308 hits. Analysis detected 4,098 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,043 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 51.6% and a BS Rank of 53% (10,143 of 21,182 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 52.10% of the article peer group.
On Friday, OpenAI announced it was withholding the wide release of its latest AI model, GPT-5.6, at the request of the U.S. government.
On the same day, the U.S.
Commerce Department told Anthropic that export controls it had slapped on that company’s powerful Mythos AI model would be relaxed, following a two-week period in which the export ban had forced Anthropic to disable the model for all users.
At first glance, it might seem like the two frontier AI labs are in a similar position in President Donald Trump’s Washington.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
Anthropic has had a far rougher ride in Trump’s D.C. than OpenAI, or pretty much any other tech company.
Twice now the administration has taken unprecedented actions that pose a potentially existential risk to the startup, which is valued at $965 billion and which has filed paperwork for an IPO that is expected in the coming months.
First, in April, the Pentagon labelled Anthropic a “supply chain risk” after it refused to accept contract language that the Pentagon was insisting upon.
Then, two weeks ago, it got hit with export controls on Mythos as well as Fable, a version of the same model built for wider commercial release—after the discovery of a Fable jailbreak that could allow users to circumvent guardrails designed to prevent users from accessing Mythos’ full cyber capabilities.
Trump administration officials have repeatedly engaged in vitriolic attacks against the company, and its CEO Dario Amodei.
Trump himself posted on social media that the company consisted of “leftwing nut jobs” who were trying to “strong-arm the Department of War” (the Pentagon, recently renamed by Trump) when the administration took the decision to label the company a “supply chain risk.”
During the same dispute, Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, posted on X that “it’s a shame that Dario Amodei is a liar and has a God-complex.”
Michael’s boss, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, called Amodei “an ideological lunatic” during an April Congressional hearing.
Meanwhile, David Sacks, Trump’s former AI and crypto czar, who continues to hold roles on several government technology advisory committees, has repeatedly accused the company of running a “sophisticated regulatory capture” strategy based on fear-mongering about AI’s dangers.
He has also said the company has an “agenda to backdoor Woke AI and other AI regulations” by supporting state-level AI laws.
During the recent export controls dispute, anonymous senior U.S. officials repeatedly sought to portray Amodei as arrogant and aloof, refusing to make himself available when the White House called.
(Anthropic has disputed these accounts, saying Amodei was on the phone with the administration within an hour and fifteen minutes of the White House calling.)
No other tech company has been subjected to these kinds of attacks from Trump administration officials.
At the heart of the conflict is a deliberate choice Anthropic has made: unlike nearly every other major tech company, it has refused to flatter or appease the White House.
Washington insiders call it politically naïve.
Anthropic’s employees and recruits, as well as some of the AI company’s customers, call it a feature.
But investors may have other ideas.
Continued hostility between the Trump administration and Anthropic could, at the very least, make it harder to sell public market investors on a stock listing.
At worst, it could significantly hobble the company’s ability to continue to develop advanced AI models and undo the widespread enterprise adoption Anthropic’s existing AI models have enjoyed.
This is the story of a company that has bet its political survival on being technically correct in a town that runs on loyalty.
There’s a standard Trump playbook.
Anthropic isn’t following it.
When Trump was elected to a second term in 2024, a number of prominent tech CEOs had reason to be worried.
Chief among them was Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg had made the call to suspend Trump from Meta’s social media platforms after the January 6, 2021 U.S.
Capitol attack.
In response, Trump had branded Facebook “an enemy of the people” and called Zuckerberg a “criminal,” even threatening him with life imprisonment if he thought the CEO was trying to swing the 2024 election against him.
What’s more, Zuckerberg had everything to gain if he could get Trump on side.
Meta was facing a landmark federal antitrust prosecution that Trump, if he could be convinced, might pressure the Justice Department to drop or settle.
So Zuckerberg went out of his way to cozy up to Trump.
He appointed a Trump loyalist Dana White to Meta’s board, ended content moderation in favor of a “community notes” system, and promoted Republican Joel Kaplan to head its global affairs team.
Zuckerberg personally donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and Meta was among the companies donating to the construction of Trump’s $300 million White House East Wing ballroom.
Meta also brought in Dina Powell McCormick, a former Trump deputy national security advisor with deep ties to the Trump family, to help lead the company’s AI strategy.
A similar playbook of flattery, donations, and the appointment of executives perceived as Trump allies to key government affairs posts has been followed by other tech CEOs who thought they might otherwise be in Trump’s crosshairs, such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
According to a recent book by New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, Trump ridiculed some of these tech CEOs for their obsequiousness in private but seemed to revel in it nonetheless—and there’s no denying that these tactics seem to have largely kept these technology giants from becoming government targets.
(Although Zuckerberg failed in his efforts to get Trump to drop the antitrust suit against Meta, which is currently underway.)
Anthropic’s arch-rival OpenAI has also played this game.
Its policy chief Chris Lehane grew up in Democratic political campaigns, but in the years before joining OpenAI became best known as a highly-effective hired gun for the crypto and tech industry in its fight against regulation.
That earned him the admiration of many in Trump’s circle, who are also investors in crypto currency ventures or come from Silicon Valley’s libertarian circles, where regulation is seen as an impediment to innovation.
Meanwhile, Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s cofounder and president, has emerged as the single largest donor to Trump Super PAC MAGA Inc.
Starting in a hole and continuing to dig
Anthropic, by contrast, started in a hole and kept digging.
Amodei, Anthropic’s cofounder and CEO, had reportedly called Trump “a feudal warlord” in a now-deleted Facebook post urging friends to vote for Kamala Harris.
His sister and fellow cofounder Daniela Amodei donated to Harris’s campaign and had, early in her career, worked for Hillary Clinton.
As if that weren’t enough, many of the Silicon Valley personas who ended up with key advisory roles in the Trump administration were on-record being critical of AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, that had warned of AI’s potentially existential risks and were advocating for AI regulation in the years before they assumed official positions.
In 2023, on his popular podcast, “All In,” Sacks, who would later become Trump’s AI and crypto czar, criticized the administration of then President Joe Biden for its AI policy, warning repeatedly that leading AI labs would push for regulations only they could comply with—the same “regulatory capture” charge he’d later level at Anthropic specifically.
JD Vance, then still a Senator, told a Congressional hearing in July 2024 that he was worried about “some preemptive overregulation attempts that would frankly entrench the tech incumbents that we already have.”
As Vice President, Vance has played a key role in tech policy deliberations.
Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, who would become a White House AI policy advisor, were also close associates of Elon Musk, having worked for him at Twitter/X.
Musk, a key Trump tech advisor, had long accused Anthropic’s Claude of being “woke AI”—a line Sacks adopted, accusing the company of being run by “committed leftists.”
Rather than hire executives that might have tempered the Trump team’s predisposition to regard the company with animosity, Anthropic made a series of moves that antagonized them.
It hired several outgoing Biden administration AI policy officials.
These included Ben Buchanan, who helped architect Biden’s “diffusion rule,” a system of export controls on critical AI technology that Trump criticized and then dismantled when he took office; Elizabeth Kelly, who had headed the U.S.
AI Safety Institute under Biden; and Tarun Chhabra, a coordinator for technology and national security on Biden’s National Security Council.
In March 2025, after law firms Skadden and Latham & Watkins reached legal settlements with Trump, Anthropic pulled its legal work from the two firms.
Amodei reportedly told staff he wouldn’t work with law firms that were caving in to what he saw as Trump’s assault on the rule of law.
But those efforts may be too little too late.
And some Washington insiders say that given the way Anthropic has tried to position itself, not just politically but commercially, as an organization dedicated to AI safety, there may be a limit to its ability to bend in ways that will satisfy Trump’s team.
“I think they probably underestimated the necessity of building relationships and of the influence of money [in Washington],” Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, a Washington lobbying group that has been supporting AI regulation from the right, told Fortune.
But he said that the real problem is essentially what Amodei diagnosed in his angry Slack message—other tech companies have been willing to do whatever the administration wants; Anthropic hasn’t.
“Anthropic, as a company, has a very clear brand and culture,” he said.
“I think they’re just kind of acting in a way that is on brand for them, and Dario is acting in a way that is on brand for him.”
Steinhauser said that if the company were to shift its stance, it might alienate its employee base, which is a key constituency in a world where AI research and engineering talent is scarce and in high demand.
It also, he said, might alienate some of the consumers that have flocked to Claude because Anthropic didn’t bow to the Pentagon’s demands.
“Is it putting them in some hot water with the administration?
Yes.
But I think it’s like a price that they’re potentially willing to pay to do what they think is the right thing to do,” Steinhauser said.
Stumbling toward a reset with the White House
Given these constraints, and given its lack of an in-house Trump whisperer, Anthropic has been hoping to depersonalize the conflict between Amodei and Trump’s team.
After his initial involvement in phone calls with Trump officials two weeks ago, Amodei has let other Anthropic executives take the lead in negotiations with the White House.
Anthropic first dispatched a team of technical executives, including one of its top cybersecurity researchers, Nicholas Carlini, Logan Graham, who evaluates AI models for risks, and Dave Orr, the company’s head of safeguards, to Washington, D.C., to meet with U.S. cybersecurity officials in the hopes of quickly convincing them to relax the export controls.
The team has, according to a story in Politico, been working on a shared framework with the government for gauging exactly how much risk particular jailbreaks of model guardrails pose.
But, perhaps in belated recognition that the White House’s objections to Anthropic’s models are as much about politics as technical risks, Anthropic has also designated Tom Brown, an Anthropic cofounder who has been heading up the company’s efforts to secure enough computing capacity for its business, and Sarah Heck, the company’s new head of policy, who served on the National Security Council during Trump’s first administration and was a career diplomat before that, to lead negotiations with the White House.
Those negotiations have started paying dividends, as the U.S. government’s decision to relax export controls on its Mythos model indicates, although the company still has not succeeded in getting the export controls on its Fable model, which it was no doubt counting on to generate a good chunk of revenue, lifted.
Anthropic is realizing, belatedly, that being right is not the same as winning—not in Trump’s Washington.
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