Anthropic Wants to Get the White House Off Its Back

Anthropic has been at the heart of a brewing drama over whether the government should regulate the AI industry or not. Specifically, the company—which has advocated for modest regulations—has been accused by a White House official of pushing for “regulatory capture.†On Tuesday, the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, penned a long blog post published to Anthropic’s website that sought to dispel the accusations against the company, while also emphasizing its commitment to “American AI leadership.â€

“Anthropic is committed to constructive engagement on matters of public policy. When we agree, we say so. When we don’t, we propose an alternative for consideration,†Amodei wrote. “We do this because we are a public benefit corporation with a mission to ensure that AI benefits everyone, and because we want to maintain America’s lead in AI. Again, we believe we share those goals with the Trump administration, both sides of Congress, and the public.â€

Amodei also made conciliatory gestures towards those in the administration. “I strongly agree with Vice President JD Vance’s recent comments on AI—particularly his point that we need to maximize applications that help people, like breakthroughs in medicine and disease prevention, while minimizing the harmful ones,†the CEO wrote, complimenting Trump’s wingman. “This position is both wise and what the public overwhelmingly wants.â€

In short: It looks like Anthropic wants to make nice with the White House, if only to get administration officials to stop heckling it from social media.

Much of the criticism against Amodei’s company has been led by PayPal mafia alumni and newly appointed White House “Crypto and AI Czar†David Sacks. Sacks, a man who many in Silicon Valley consider to be a massive jerk, has been on a tear against Anthropic, accusing the firm on X of “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.†Sacks also claimed the startup is “principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem.†In a different social media post, Sacks also claimed that Anthropic had an “agenda to backdoor Woke AI and other AI regulations through Blue states like California.â€

The dispute stems from an ideological battle currently consuming the AI industry. On one side of this debate are companies like Anthropic, which think that the AI industry should be lightly regulated. Critics inside and outside of the tech industry have accused this rhetoric of being self-serving. The theory is that these are not authentic pleas for sensible regulation but a not-so-subtle effort to control the laws around the emerging AI business and thus tip the scales in the “pro-regulation†camp’s favor. Then there are the tech accelerationists, who seem to feel that any kind of AI regulations are a net negative for “humanity†(or, you know, their pocket books). In short: it’s a battle between companies arguing for some form of techno-moderation (albeit potentially self-serving moderation) and hapless tech “optimists†who feel that moderation is a dirty word.

It would appear that, so far, the tech accelerationinists are winning, as their sympathizers are currently running the White House. Anthropic is also one of the major AI companies (aside from Elon Musk’s xAI) that have not been involved in the White House’s Stargate initiative, which seeks to develop new AI infrastructure in the U.S. in the form, mostly, of data centers. OpenAI is at the heart of the Stargate effort, but other companies—including OpenAI’s sugar daddy, Microsoft, Oracle, NVIDIA, and Arm—are also participating.