At the heart of Anthropic’s clashes with the U.S. government, a decision not to play by the new rules of Trump’s Washington

On Friday, OpenAI announced it was withholding the wide release of its latest AI model, GPT-5.6, at the request of the U.S. government. On the same day, the U.S. Commerce Department told Anthropic that export controls it had slapped on that company’s powerful Mythos AI model would be relaxed, following a two-week period in which the export ban had forced Anthropic to disable the model for all users.

At first glance, it might seem like the two frontier AI labs are in a similar position in President Donald Trump’s Washington. But nothing could be further from the truth. Anthropic has had a far rougher ride in Trump’s D.C. than OpenAI, or pretty much any other tech company.

Twice now the administration has taken unprecedented actions that pose a potentially existential risk to the startup, which is valued at $965 billion and which has filed paperwork for an IPO that is expected in the coming months. First, in April, the Pentagon labelled Anthropic a “supply chain risk” after it refused to accept contract language that the Pentagon was insisting upon. Then, two weeks ago, it got hit with export controls on Mythos as well as Fable, a version of the same model built for wider commercial release—after the discovery of a Fable jailbreak that could allow users to circumvent guardrails designed to prevent users from accessing Mythos’ full cyber capabilities.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly engaged in vitriolic attacks against the company, and its CEO Dario Amodei. Trump himself posted on social media that the company consisted of “leftwing nut jobs” who were trying to “strong-arm the Department of War” (the Pentagon, recently renamed by Trump) when the administration took the decision to label the company a “supply chain risk.” During the same dispute, Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, posted on X that “it’s a shame that Dario Amodei is a liar and has a God-complex.” Michael’s boss, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, called Amodei “an ideological lunatic” during an April Congressional hearing. Meanwhile, David Sacks, Trump’s former AI and crypto czar, who continues to hold roles on several government technology advisory committees, has repeatedly accused the company of running a “sophisticated regulatory capture” strategy based on fear-mongering about AI’s dangers. He has also said the company has an “agenda to backdoor Woke AI and other AI regulations” by supporting state-level AI laws.

During the recent export controls dispute, anonymous senior U.S. officials repeatedly sought to portray Amodei as arrogant and aloof, refusing to make himself available when the White House called. (Anthropic has disputed these accounts, saying Amodei was on the phone with the administration within an hour and fifteen minutes of the White House calling.) No other tech company has been subjected to these kinds of attacks from Trump administration officials.

At the heart of the conflict is a deliberate choice Anthropic has made: unlike nearly every other major tech company, it has refused to flatter or appease the White House. Washington insiders call it politically naïve. Anthropic’s employees and recruits, as well as some of the AI company’s customers, call it a feature. But investors may have other ideas. Continued hostility between the Trump administration and Anthropic could, at the very least, make it harder to sell public market investors on a stock listing. At worst, it could significantly hobble the company’s ability to continue to develop advanced AI models and undo the widespread enterprise adoption Anthropic’s existing AI models have enjoyed. This is the story of a company that has bet its political survival on being technically correct in a town that runs on loyalty.

There’s a standard Trump playbook. Anthropic isn’t following it.

When Trump was elected to a second term in 2024, a number of prominent tech CEOs had reason to be worried. Chief among them was Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg had made the call to suspend Trump from Meta’s social media platforms after the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol attack. In response, Trump had branded Facebook “an enemy of the people” and called Zuckerberg a “criminal,” even threatening him with life imprisonment if he thought the CEO was trying to swing the 2024 election against him. What’s more, Zuckerberg had everything to gain if he could get Trump on side. Meta was facing a landmark federal antitrust prosecution that Trump, if he could be convinced, might pressure the Justice Department to drop or settle.

So Zuckerberg went out of his way to cozy up to Trump. He appointed a Trump loyalist Dana White to Meta’s board, ended content moderation in favor of a “community notes” system, and promoted Republican Joel Kaplan to head its global affairs team. Zuckerberg personally donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and Meta was among the companies donating to the construction of........

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