Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei hit out against the Trump Administration after the company was labeled a security risk for refusing to change its terms of service to allow mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

In an internal letter, published in full by The Information, Amodei criticized the Department of Defense (stylized the Department of War) as well as rival company OpenAI, which has signed a contract with the DoD to takeover Anthropic's work.

"The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot)," he said. OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife have donated $25 million to Trump super PAC 'MAGA Inc,' along with another $25m to an AI super PAC. CEO Sam Altman gave $1m to Trump's inauguration.

Amodei continued: "We haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has)." It is not clear what specific praise Amodei is referring to, however Altman said during the Stargate unveiling: "For AGI to get built here, to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, to create a new industry centered here, we wouldn't be able to do this without you, Mr. President," and later said that Trump "gets it" with AI. Back in 2016, Altman called Trump "an unprecedented threat to America."

Anthropic's CEO claimed that the company had also risked the Trump Admin's wrath because it "supported AI regulation which is against their agenda, we’ve told the truth about a number of AI policy issues (like job displacement), and we’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce “safety theater” for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at DoW, Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve)."

Last month, Anthropic said that it would donate $20m to Public First Action, a PAC in favor of AI guardrails.

Amodei claimed that these political differences and Anthropic's refusal to weaken its terms of service were behind a showdown with the DoD that led to Trump labeling the business "Leftwing nut jobs," and telling Federal agencies to stop using its services. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the company will be designated a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security.

Following the exchange, OpenAI announced that it would work with the DoD, but claimed that it had managed to ensure safeguards on surveillance and autonomous weaponry.

Amodei called messaging from OpenAI about its clash with the DoD "mendacious," and "an example of who they really are, and I want to make sure [everyone] sees it for what it is."

He said that OpenAI's safeguards were mostly safety theater, and "mostly do not work." He added that it was "false that OpenAI’s terms meaningfully protect them against domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons."

These concerns were genuine and relevant as Anthropic had already been asked about mass surveillance. Amodei said: "Near the end of the negotiation, the DoW offered to accept our current terms if we deleted a specific phrase about 'analysis of bulk acquired data,' which was the single line in the contract that exactly matched this scenario we were most worried about.

"A lot of OpenAI and DoW messaging just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them."

The comments make it appear unlikely that either Anthropic or the DoD will back down from their conflict. Anthropic said that it plans to fight its supply-chain risk designation in court.