Shocker! Federal Ban on Anthropic is for Show

Getting banned by the White House/Pentagon is probably the best news that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei ever got.

Anthropic, maker of Claude, is tiny in terms of number of users compared to OpenAI, but their revenue, NOW, is actually billions higher than OpenAI.

The White House, through the Pentagon, said Anthropic is a supply chain risk and the federal government and government contractors must stop using it.

It turns out Claude, Anthropic’s flagship product was critical in launching the first bombs in the Iran war.

Now it turns out that maybe the ban is not much of a ban.

Quietly, Anthropic’s CEO met with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Bessent about the feds use of their software.

Bessent and Fed Chair Powell are, again quietly so as to not disturb the pretend ban, “encouraging” the money center banks to test out Anthropic’s software.

Separately, the NSA is reported to be using Mythos, too. The NSA is part of the Defense Department, which issued the ban.

Of course, as usually happens in these cases, Anthropic is suing the Pentagon, so if or when they lose, likely when, they can go back to using it publicly with some sort of announcement that they are just following the court’s ruling.

All in all, this was a hell of a PR campaign for Anthropic and Amodei is probably pretty happy about things right now. Who is probably less happy is Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, since he is no longer getting all of the press.

Credit: Tech Crunch and Axios

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