Tom Brown has taken the lead on Anthropic's Washington outreach; Lutnick says Anthropic is 'back on the right side'

Tom Brown, Anthropic's chief compute officer [AFP]
Tom Brown, Anthropic's chief compute officer [AFP]

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael met with a senior Anthropic executive to discuss AI safety, according to Bloomberg.

Lutnick and Michael held a video call with Anthropic Chief Compute Officer Tom Brown on Tuesday (local time) to exchange views on AI safety risks.

Anthropic did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment, and the White House also declined to offer a statement.

Brown is one of Anthropic's co-founders. The company's website describes him as leading "the technical organization responsible for securing, scaling, and efficiently using compute resources."

He has recently taken over as the public face of Anthropic's Washington engagement in place of CEO Dario Amodei, and is credited with improving the company's relationship with Trump administration officials and easing tensions between the firm and the government.

Brown played a central role in persuading the White House and the Commerce Department in June to lift export controls on Anthropic's latest frontier AI models, "Fable 5" and "Mythos 5."

Business Insider ran a profile of him in early July under the headline "The engineer who became Anthropic's secret political weapon."

In early September, Brown appeared alongside Lutnick at a public discussion at the G20 Innovation Ministerial Meeting held in North Carolina, where he spoke warmly of President Donald Trump's support for data centers.

In a Bloomberg TV interview on the sidelines of that event, Lutnick said Anthropic had changed its position and repaired its relationship with the government. In a separate Axios interview, he said, "We trust Anthropic."

However, Brown had also negotiated with the Pentagon over the military's use of Anthropic's technology, and those talks broke down after the Pentagon determined that Anthropic's conditions amounted to an infringement on military authority.

The Pentagon subsequently placed Anthropic on a "supply chain risk" list, and the two sides have been engaged in legal proceedings since.

The details of Brown's conversation with Lutnick and Michael have not been disclosed, but the meeting is believed to have been aimed at narrowing differences between Anthropic and the administration and reducing tensions at a time when Trump has shown little receptiveness to AI safety concerns.

Tensions between major AI companies, including Anthropic, and the Trump administration have been building since Saturday, when Amodei published a 3,800-word essay calling for checks on AI development.

Amodei argued that guardrails are needed for AI safety and that the pace of advanced AI model development should be slowed. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and xAI, quickly voiced support for his position.

Trump pushed back sharply against Amodei's views, dismissing concerns about AI risks as a "hoax" and opposing the introduction of new regulations.

In a post on his Truth Social account on Monday, Trump argued that having a "smart" person like himself in the presidency was sufficient as a safeguard for AI, and warned that slowing AI development would only benefit rivals such as China.


mokiya@heraldcorp.com