Anthropic and the Pentagon are back at the negotiating table, FT reports

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is back at the negotiating table with the U.S. Department of Defense after the breakdown of talks on Friday over the use of the company's AI tools by the military, according to The Financial Times. Amodei is in talks with Emil Michael, under-secretary of defense for research and engineering, in a last-ditch effort to reach an agreement on the terms governing the Pentagon's access to Anthropic's Claude models, the Times reported , citing anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter. Discussions fell apart Friday, with President Donald Trump directing federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's tools, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth saying he would designate the company a supply-chain risk to national security. Last week, Michael had attacked Amodei, calling him a "liar" with a "God complex," in an X post. Agreeing to a new contract would enable the U.S. military to continue using Anthropic's technology, which has reportedly been utilized in Washington's war with Iran. Claude became the first major model deployed in the government's classified networks through a $200 million contract awarded by the DoD to Anthropic, but the company later sought guarantees that its tools would not be used in domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. The Pentagon had demanded that the military be allowed to employ the technology for any lawful use. In a Friday memo seen by FT, Amodei reportedly told staff that near the end of negotiations with the Defense Department, it had offered to accept Anthropic's terms if they deleted a "specific phrase about 'analysis of bulk acquired data'" — a line he said, "exactly matched this scenario we were most worried about." Amodei also wrote in his note that messaging from the Pentagon and OpenAI, which struck a new deal with the Defense Department on Friday, was "just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse. The timing of OpenAI's deal with the Pentagon, announced within hours of the White House decry...