Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei is set to meet White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on Friday, according to a person briefed on the plan, as the federal government races to understand the national security implications of a powerful new artificial intelligence model the company says it has developed.
The meeting reflects the strange embrace Anthropic and the Trump administration are locked in. The White House has sought to blacklist the company and prevent it from doing business with the government after a dispute over use of its AI model by the Pentagon spun out of control this year. At the same time, the government has been forced to engage with the company over the risks posed by its next-generation system, known as Mythos.
Anthropic says the new model has powerful new abilities to find security weaknesses in computer code. That could help programmers fix long-dormant vulnerabilities — but it could also supercharge hackers targeting American businesses and government agencies.
The company has said it has briefed government cybersecurity agencies on the new model. Officials at the White House and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have been studying its implications, according to an internal email obtained by The Washington Post and a person briefed on the discussions. Officials are exploring the possibility of giving more agencies access to a version of the model, according to the email.
“There are some people who are very freaked out,” including Wiles, Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to characterize private conversations. “Rightly so.”
An Anthropic spokesman declined to comment on the planned meeting, which was first reported by Axios.
The Trump administration has sought to speed the development of AI, trying to push aside regulations that could hold the industry back and position America to win what it sees as a race with China to dominate the technology. But the increasing power of the new generation of systems means officials are now having to confront some of the downsides that the technology could bring.
President Donald Trump remained bullish about the prospects of the technology but was asked this week if some forms of AI should have a “kill switch.”
“There should be,” Trump told Fox Business.
A White House official said the administration is working with leading AI labs “to ensure their models help secure critical software vulnerabilities.”
Anthropic announced the new model last week and said it would not release it publicly. Instead, the company formed a coalition of major tech companies and other big businesses to size up the risks it poses and try to patch any holes. It called the effort Project Glasswing. The AI lab said Mythos had already unearthed thousands of vulnerabilities, affecting every major computer operating system and web browser. OpenAI, one of the other leading labs, is finalizing a potent next-generation system code-named Spud.
“Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely,” Anthropic said in its announcement. “The fallout — for economies, public safety, and national security — could be severe.”
Federal agencies have been rushing to respond. In the days after the announcement, Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell hosted the chief executives of major banks in Washington to urge them to take the risks seriously. Bessent said that he sees the power of the AI systems growing quickly and that some financial institutions are better at cybersecurity than others.
“I feel confident that everyone is now on board, rowing in the same direction to build up resiliency,” Bessent said in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday.
Until this spring, Anthropic had had a close relationship with the federal government, having been the first of the major AI companies approved to work on the classified systems where agencies store their secrets. But as the Defense Department pushed for more control over how Anthropic’s Claude model could be used — seeking the freedom to use it for any lawful purpose — Amodei pushed back, saying he would not agree to the tool being used to power fully autonomous weapons or carry out mass domestic surveillance.
Amodei met personally with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to try to reach a deal, but the talks collapsed at the end of February. Trump blasted Anthropic’s leaders as “Leftwing nut jobs.”
A court in San Francisco ruled that the blacklisting was probably illegal, but a separate panel of federal judges in Washington issued a preliminary ruling allowing it to remain in place.
Claude is deeply enmeshed in the military’s systems. The same night that the Trump administration said it would cut ties with Anthropic, its system was put to use to aid the bombing campaign in Iran.
And in a sign that the company was trying to repair its relationship with the White House, disclosures filed this week showed that it had spent $130,000 in March to hire lobbyist Brian Ballard, who has close ties with the president’s team.
The post Anthropic CEO heads to White House amid hacking fears over new AI model appeared first on Washington Post.
