In short: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday in what the White House called “productive and constructive” talks over access to Mythos, the frontier AI model capable of finding thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities. The meeting signals a thaw in the standoff that began when the Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic for refusing to drop safety restrictions, though any deal would likely exclude the Defence Department and route Mythos access through civilian agencies.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei walked into the West Wing on Friday for a meeting with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The White House described the conversation as “introductory, productive, and constructive,” saying the three discussed “opportunities for collaboration, as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology.” President Trump later told reporters he had “no idea” the meeting had taken place.
The meeting is the most significant step toward resolving a standoff that has left one of the most important AI companies in the world blacklisted by its own government while that same government scrambles to gain access to its most powerful model. If the two sides reach a deal, it will likely exclude the Pentagon entirely, routing Mythos access through civilian agencies that are not party to the original dispute.
How we got here
The conflict began in late February when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that Anthropic grant the Pentagon unfettered access to its AI models for “all lawful purposes,” including autonomous weapons systems and domestic surveillance. Amodei refused. He has said publicly that Anthropic wants to work with the military, but that AI models are not yet reliable enough for autonomous weapons and that US law has not caught up to protect Americans around AI’s use in mass surveillance. Hegseth’s response was to designate Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk, a classification previously reserved for companies associated with foreign adversaries, effectively blacklisting it from all government contracts.
Anthropic sued the Trump administration in early March, filing two federal lawsuits alleging illegal retaliation. A federal judge initially blocked the blacklisting, but an appeals court reversed that decision on 8 April. Anthropic is now excluded from Department of Defense contracts but can still work with other government agencies. After the court ruling went against it, Anthropic hired Trumpworld consultants to facilitate a political resolution, and Axios reported that Friday’s meeting was designed to pave the way toward a deal.
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The paradox that brought Amodei to the White House is that Anthropic announced Mythos on 7 April, ten days after losing its appeal, and the model turned out to be something the government could not ignore.
What Mythos can do
Mythos is a general-purpose AI model that, during testing, proved capable of identifying and exploiting thousands of previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser. It found flaws that had survived decades of human security review. When directed to develop working exploits, it succeeded on the first attempt in more than 83% of cases. It is the first AI model to complete a 32-step corporate network attack simulation from start to finish. The UK’s AI Security Institute evaluated it as “substantially more capable at cyber offence than any model previously assessed.” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said publicly that it “reveals a lot more vulnerabilities” for cyberattacks. The Council on Foreign Relations called it “an inflection point for AI and global security.”
Anthropic chose not to release Mythos publicly. Instead, it created Project Glasswing, a controlled access programme providing the model to roughly 40 vetted organisations, including Amazon Web Services, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and JPMorgan Chase, to find and fix vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. The company committed up to $100 million in Mythos usage credits and $4 million to open-source security organisations. The decision to restrict rather than release is a direct application of the safety principles that put Anthropic in conflict with the Pentagon in the first place.
What each side wants
The Treasury Department is seeking Mythos to hunt for vulnerabilities in its own systems. Parts of the intelligence community and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are already testing it. The White House Office of Management and Budget is setting up protections to allow federal agencies to use a controlled version. Bessent’s presence at Friday’s meeting signals that the economic and financial security arguments for Mythos access have reached the most senior levels of the administration.
Anthropic needs the blacklisting resolved. Not because it needs Pentagon revenue; the company’s annualised revenue has reached $30 billion, it has attracted investor offers at an $800 billion valuation, and it is exploring an IPO. But the supply-chain risk designation damages its enterprise credibility and creates uncertainty for every government-adjacent customer. What Amodei wants is a resolution that restores his company’s standing without surrendering the safety commitments that provoked the dispute.
The outlines of a compromise are visible. Anthropic would provide Mythos access for defensive cybersecurity purposes through civilian agencies. The administration would withdraw or narrow the supply-chain risk designation. The Pentagon would remain excluded unless a separate process for reviewing specific military use cases can be agreed. Both sides have incentives: Anthropic because the blacklisting is commercially damaging, and the White House because the technology is too valuable to forgo.
The pressure from abroad
The diplomatic dimension adds urgency. Anthropic is planning to provide Mythos to select British banks within days and is quadrupling its London office to 800 staff. The Bank of England’s Governor Andrew Bailey named Mythos as a cybersecurity risk in a speech at Columbia University on 15 April, and the Bank’s Cross Market Operational Resilience Group is convening an emergency briefing with the CEOs of the UK’s eight largest banks and representatives from the Treasury, the FCA, and the National Cyber Security Centre. Canadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne described Mythos as an “unknown unknown” at IMF meetings.
The result is a situation in which America’s closest allies may have access to a critical national security tool before the US government does. That geopolitical reality gives the White House an incentive to resolve the dispute that transcends the original disagreement over safety guardrails. Bessent, whose Treasury Department is one of the agencies most eager for Mythos access, presumably made this point in Friday’s meeting.
What Friday means
The word “introductory” in the White House readout is carefully chosen. It signals that Wiles and Bessent are opening a channel, not closing a deal. The litigation is still active. The appeals court ruling still stands. Hegseth has not withdrawn his position. But the fact that the White House Chief of Staff and the Treasury Secretary sat down with the CEO of a company the Pentagon has blacklisted, and described the conversation as productive, represents a shift in the administration’s posture that would have been difficult to imagine six weeks ago.
Amodei built the most capable cybersecurity tool in existence as a byproduct of building a general-purpose AI model, then restricted its release on safety grounds, then was punished by the government for maintaining those same safety principles, and is now being courted by that government because the tool cannot be replicated or replaced. That sequence is playing out not in a congressional hearing or a regulatory proceeding but in a room in the West Wing where the most powerful chief of staff in a generation, the Treasury Secretary, and the CEO of an AI company are trying to find a formula that satisfies national security, commercial reality, and the safety principles that started the whole fight. Friday did not produce that formula. But it established that everyone in the room wants one.
