Anthropic has gone from Washington’s AI outcast to a company the Trump administration says it can trust.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the administration now trusts Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei, marking a sharp shift after months of public clashes over the company’s AI safety limits.
“We trust Anthropic,” Lutnick told Axios’ Mike Allen in an interview Tuesday. “They’ve done what we asked. They’re back on the right side. So the answer is: Yes.”
The comments come after a bitter dispute over Anthropic’s refusal to allow its Claude AI models to be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk after the company refused to allow those uses, a move that blocked it from certain military contracts, according to Reuters.
Anthropic sued over the government’s actions. A federal judge on Aug. 27 ruled that the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk was unlawful, finding that the government had retaliated against the company in violation of the First Amendment. Anthropic also has a related case pending in the D.C. Circuit.
Anthropic steps up Washington outreach
The warmer rhetoric was reinforced Wednesday when Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown appeared alongside Lutnick at a tech-focused G20 gathering in North Carolina.
Lutnick introduced Brown to the group of officials, while Brown used the event to emphasize the economic importance of data centers and praise President Donald Trump’s recent support for the infrastructure.
“I really love Trump’s post from earlier this week… where he was pointing out that the data centers are just an enormous source of prosperity,” Brown said, per Axios.
Brown reportedly held multiple discussions with Lutnick and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross as Anthropic worked to repair its relationship with Washington.
What's hot at TechRepublic
- Blackpoint Cyber vs. Arctic Wolf: Which MDR Solution is Right for You?
- Why AWS Sellers Choose Deepgram Over Other Voice AI Tools
- SS&C Intralinks DealCentre AI vs. Datasite: Which platform is built for the future of dealmaking?
- SS&C Intralinks FundCentre AI vs. Juniper Square: Which platform better supports modern private markets fund managers?
- Verito vs. Rightworks: Which IT Provider Is Best for Your Firm?
What the reset could mean
The significance goes beyond friendlier public comments. Anthropic is trying to establish that it can set limits on sensitive AI applications without becoming an obstacle to the administration’s broader technology agenda.
That puts the company in a potentially useful middle ground: defending restrictions on how its models are deployed while publicly supporting priorities such as data center expansion.
For Anthropic, rebuilding trust could matter commercially if the reset makes federal agencies more willing to award the company AI work again. But the unresolved court fight shows that the underlying disagreement over government access and AI safeguards has not disappeared.
The company therefore faces a delicate test: maintain the safety boundaries that triggered its clash with the Pentagon while convincing Washington that it remains a willing partner. For enterprise and government technology buyers, the next thing to watch is whether warmer rhetoric translates into renewed federal use of Claude and new government AI contracts.