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Anthropic is finding itself in one of the most unusual positions in Washington: While it is fighting the US government in court, it is also one of the core group members of the tech companies that are sitting on private calls with Trump administration’s most senior officials, including vice president JD Vance.Dario Amodei, CEO of the AI safety company behind the Claude platform, was among a select group of technology CEOs who joined a concall last week with Vance and treasury secretary Scott Bessent to discuss the security implications of powerful AI models.Citing two people familiar with the matter, a report by CNBC claims that this conversation that took place just before Anthropic released its highly restricted Mythos model to a limited group of companies, which included Microsoft, Google, Apple and other AI bigwigs.Other than Amodei, the group of CEOs included Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sundar Pichai of Google,Satya Nadellaof Microsoft, Elon Musk of xAI, George Kurtz of CrowdStrike and Nikesh Arora of Palo Alto Networks.This came at a time when Anthropic was preparing to release Mythos, its most powerful AI model to date, which the company had decided to restrict to approximately 40 major technology companies after internal assessments suggested it could expose long-hidden cybersecurity vulnerabilities.Amodei’s presence on the call carries significant weight given the current state of Anthropic’s relationship with the federal government.President Donald Trump’s administration is actively seeking to strip Anthropic’s Claude platform from federal agencies, and the company is currently locked in a legal battle over a Department of War supply chain risk designation that has effectively blacklisted it from Pentagon contracts.While a federal judge in San Francisco granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the blacklisting, a federal appeals court subsequently denied the company’s request to extend that temporary block.Meanwhile, the company confirmed to CNBC that it had briefed “senior officials across the US government on Mythos Preview’s full capabilities.“Prior to any external release, Anthropic briefed senior officials across the U.S. government on Mythos Preview’s full capabilities, including both its offensive and defensive cyber applications. Bringing government into the loop early — on what the model can do, where the risks are, and how we’re managing them — was a priority from the start,” the official said.
