The Friday gathering marked a striking shift in tone from the public broadsides that had characterized the relationship since February, when the Defense Department first accused the AI startup of threatening national security.
The administration’s retreat from its confrontation with Anthropic has accelerated in recent days, according to six tech lobbyists and policy experts, two of whom have direct ties to the White House. The Justice Department on Wednesday asked a federal judge to pause the government’s appeal of a ruling that had blocked much of the administration’s punitive actions against the company. Trump himself this week described Anthropic’s executives as “very smart people,” a sharp departure from his earlier posture.
The détente reflects growing concern inside the administration that the feud is preventing federal agencies from accessing Anthropic’s powerful new Mythos AI model, which cybersecurity officials believe could help identify and patch critical vulnerabilities before hostile actors exploit them. One major motivation for ceasing hostilities, the sources said, is enabling government use of the model for cyber defense purposes.
“The administration is definitely still fighting in court. I wouldn’t characterize it as being over in that regard,” said Dean Ball, a former White House adviser who served as lead author of the administration’s AI Action Plan. “But I think that clearly there are some people who see the whole thing as a distraction they don’t need.” Ball suggested that sentiment was strongest among officials who were “only spectators” when the Defense Department began sparring with Anthropic in February over the company’s attempt to impose ethical limits on military use of its software.
The Pentagon has not dropped its most aggressive attack on the company. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared in March that Anthropic’s ethics policies posed a risk to the national security supply chain, and the two sides remain locked in two federal lawsuits over the administration’s penalties. Neither Hegseth nor Defense Undersecretary Emil Michael, who has led much of the department’s criticism of Anthropic, attended Friday’s White House meeting.
The balance of power inside the White House has shifted toward a faction that wants to make peace, the six people closely following the dispute said. Three of them were granted anonymity to speak candidly about the still-fraught relationship between the administration and the AI company. The internal divide has pitted national security hawks against officials who view the confrontation as a costly distraction from other policy priorities.
Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant and the underlying Mythos model remain subject to formal restrictions on federal use, including the Pentagon blacklist. But the administration has taken public steps to loosen those limits in recent weeks, signaling a willingness to restore normal business ties with a company that had been treated as a pariah just months earlier. The legal proceedings continue, but the political momentum appears to have shifted decisively toward de-escalation.
