It’s a Beast of a time in Washington. Donald Trump’s D.C. reality show is full of new characters, plot twists, and cliffhangers, and the Daily Beast will navigate you through it. The 47th president won’t need to drain The Swamp. It’s all leaking here…
Everything today is political... even AI companies.
The Republicans have their’s with Elon Musk and also with Sam Altman, who recently accompanied Donald Trump to the Middle East and has swerved to the darker side.
But now the Dems have their own AI company.
We were tipped off when Reed Hastings joined the Board of Anthropic. The other big hint came with Anthropic opposing the president’s Big Beautiful Bill. Further research revealed other Dem stalwarts at the heart of the company.
It was never going to be easy for Joe Biden’s ex-staffers to find new jobs with questions still flying over what his inner circle knew about his mental decline. Nobody wants to update their LinkedIn profile from Senior Adviser to Seniors Helper.
But Anthropic embraced the fight against the Donbot. Now it’s Claude vs ChatGPT (and Grok).
Hastings knows something about Biden; he’s a Democratic Party mega donor who has contributed more than $20 million in the past few years. He was also one of the first insiders to suggest Biden should stand down last summer.
An early Anthropic funder was Facebook co-founder and Dems donor Dustin Moskovitz. Anthropic also recently hired Tarun Chhabra, who served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Coordinator for Technology and National Security at the National Security Council under Biden. Already in situ was Elizabeth Kelly, former Special Assistant to the President at the National Economic Council, who joined in March after two years in the White House. She has a terrific-sounding role as Head of Beneficial Deployments. Ben Buchanan, Biden’s Special Adviser on AI, is an adviser to the $60 billion Silicon Valley company. Anthropic’s legislative analyst Benjamin Merkel was Biden’s Special Assistant to the President and Senate Liaison between January 2024 and January 2025.
To add the cherry on the Trump resistance cake, Anthropic added a Harvard ingredient to its Economic Advisory Board, with the appointment last month of Dr. Chiara Farronato, from Harvard Business School. Dr. Farronato is also co-Principal Investigatory of the Platform Lab at the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard (D^3)...whatever that means.
The Anthropic opposition can take heart from Trump’s AI “Czar” David Sacks, who complained on his All In podcast about comments from CEO Dario Amodei predicting that AI could take 50 percent of entry-level white collar jobs in five years. Sacks said that observation was just “headline-grabbing” and that Amodei’s claim three years ago that AI would create bioweapons never came true. Well, that’s a relief. Tuesday’s always preferable to Doomsday.
This item was written without The Swamp’s knowledge by an autopen.
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Written by David Gardner, Farrah Tomazin, and Sarah Ewall-Wice.
