Senior Trump administration officials met Tuesday with Anthropic PBC's top Washington executive to discuss artificial intelligence safety risks. Anthropic's chief compute officer Tom Brown, who has become the face of the company in Washington, spoke virtually with Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to people familiar with the matter.
Anthropic declined to comment. In a statement, a Department of Defense official said it “maintains contact with frontier AI companies. Although the department's stance on Anthropic has not changed.”
Tensions between Anthropic and the administration were reignited by a 3,800-word essay posted Saturday by the company's Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei, who called for government regulation and urged pacing development of the most advanced AI systems so researchers can better understand potential threats.
Amodei's missive, which was quickly embraced by rivals OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, prompted a vehement reaction from President Donald Trump. He dismissed fears about AI risks as “a hoax” and rejected the idea of new rules.
Still, leading AI developers have begun discussing AI safety concerns among themselves. OpenAI's global policy chief Chris Lehane said his company has been engaging with Anthropic and Google DeepMind for several weeks on the issue. “It's better to try to work together to prioritize safety,” Lehane said at a Tuesday briefing in Washington.
Mounting concerns about the risks of cutting-edge AI models took center stage in forums across the US on Tuesday. At Salesforce Inc.'s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Amodei, Altman and Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang all weighed in on the topic, while an AI gathering in Washington saw progressive Senator Bernie Sanders and ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon share rare common ground as both warned that AI companies are jeopardizing human interests.
At Dreamforce, both Altman and Huang acknowledged concerns but argued AI companies would safely pace their technology, without needing regulations.
Worries about the potential dangers of advanced AI went mainstream over the past week after the high-profile departure of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who accused AI companies of “gambling with our lives” in a resignation post he shared on social media.
Emil Michael Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
Photo Credit: (Photo: Bloomberg)
Michael, who has led Pentagon efforts to accelerate AI adoption across the military, has publicly rejected Coxon's claim that AI could kill all humans, while Lutnick is eager to push back on negative messaging about the technology ahead of the midterms in November, according to people familiar with the matter.
Relations between Anthropic and the US government have been strained following a disagreement earlier this year with the Commerce Department over the security of its advanced Mythos and Fable AI models and a tiff with the Pentagon over the use of its tech in military operations.
Michael helped lead negotiations with the company over the military's use of its tech, but those talks broke down when the Pentagon rejected Anthropic's terms, calling them an infringement on the military's authority. It then blacklisted the firm, declaring it a threat to the US supply chain. Anthropic is still engaged in an active lawsuit against the Pentagon in a Washington court over the blacklisting.
Brown emerged on the Washington scene earlier this summer, as he led high-stakes negotiations with US officials to lift export controls that were placed on Anthropic's most advanced AI models. He succeeded in that task, and spoke publicly alongside Lutnick at a tech-focused G20 summit earlier this month, making a point to praise Trump's support for data centers.
In a Bloomberg Television interview from the sidelines, Lutnick said the company had “gotten religion” and patched its relationship with the government, though the Pentagon later said that its own blacklisting of the company remained in place.
Brown is now likely to face yet another fraught challenge: easing tension with US officials over AI safety at a time when the president is rejecting such concerns.
Trump said in a post to his Truth Social network Monday that his presidency is the only safety guardrail needed for AI. He added that slowing down AI is a bad idea that would only serve US adversaries like China.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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