Just over four weeks ago, Trump posted on Truth Social demanding the federal government "immediately stop doing any business with Anthropic." The Defense Department had listed Anthropic as a supply chain security risk. Anthropic filed an emergency legal application, but the court rejected it, and the ban remained in effect.
Then, last Friday, Dario Amodei brought Mythos to the White House for a meeting.
On April 21, Trump told CNBC that Anthropic is "shaping up," that cooperation between the Pentagon and Anthropic is "possible," and that the company "could be very useful."
The speed of this reversal is dramatic.
How the Dispute Began
Anthropic's cooperation with the Pentagon did not start out so confrontationally.
Last July, the two sides signed a $200 million contract to bring Claude onto the GenAI.mil platform — one of the Defense Department's core projects for advancing AI applications. The honeymoon was short. By September, negotiations had collapsed:
- The Pentagon's demand: Unrestricted access to Claude for all "lawful purposes"
- Anthropic's red line: No use in fully autonomous weapons systems, no use in domestic mass surveillance
Neither side budged. In March, the Defense Department listed Anthropic as a "supply chain risk," Trump personally posted on Truth Social demanding an "immediate halt" to use, and a federal court rejected Anthropic's emergency application, maintaining the ban.
At that point, it looked like a genuine dead end.
What Mythos Changed
Dario did not go to the White House empty-handed last Friday. He brought Mythos — the model that Anthropic's internal assessments deemed "too dangerous to release publicly."
No public details of the demonstration are available, but the outcome suggests what happened: White House officials saw Mythos's real capabilities in certain scenarios and how valuable it could be for military and intelligence work.
Trump's shift in language speaks for itself. From "never doing business with them again" to "shaping up" — that term carries weight in political contexts and usually signals that the other side has made some concession or commitment.
The most likely scenario: Anthropic adjusted its definition of "lawful military use" boundaries, or signaled willingness to renegotiate specific use restrictions rather than insisting on a blanket prohibition.
The White House's Calculus
The Trump administration already has a strong interest in military AI applications — the AI Action Plan explicitly mentions maintaining U.S. leadership in AI military capabilities, and companies like OpenAI and Palantir are already deeply involved in defense projects.
But Mythos is on a different level. It is the strongest model known to have passed internal security reviews for cyberattack capabilities, and the most likely AI tool to deliver practical value in scenarios like cyber warfare and intelligence analysis.
If Anthropic is willing to provide access under some controlled conditions, it would be surprising if the White House did not want that capability.
What Remains Unsettled
The two sides are now in a "possibilities open" phase, with no specific terms disclosed.
Several things remain unclear:
- Whether Anthropic's two previous red lines — autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance — still stand or have been redefined
- Whether the Pentagon's original "unrestricted access" demand has softened
- What the final contract's scale and oversight mechanism will look like
Notably, on the same day Trump said a deal was "possible," Mythos was also hit with an unauthorized access security incident: a Discord group quietly accessed the model for two weeks through a supply chain vulnerability.
On one hand, Anthropic was showing the government its security control capabilities; on the other, it was exposed for having its preview environment breached. Timing-wise, Anthropic must have found it deeply uncomfortable.
Sources: Trump says Anthropic Pentagon deal is 'possible', weeks after blacklisting the company as a national security risk (The Next Web); CocoLoop, Trump Signals Possible Defense Deal with Anthropic After White House Talks (The Deep Dive); Trump Is Warming Up to Anthropic Again (Gizmodo)