The AI giant suing Donald Trump’s administration over what it calls an illegal vendetta has quietly begun mending fences with the White House—after quietly hiring a well-connected former Trump insider.
Anthropic has been locked in battle with the administration since February, when CEO Dario Amodei refused Pentagon demands to remove safeguards blocking its product Claude’s use for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 45, responded by designating the company a “supply-chain risk to national security”—a label previously reserved for foreign adversaries—and Trump ordered all federal agencies to stop using Claude. Anthropic filed two federal lawsuits in March, alleging unlawful retaliation.
But on Monday, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told the Semafor World Economy Summit in Washington that the company is now in active talks with the Trump administration about Mythos, its newest frontier model. It has been described as its “most capable yet for coding and agentic tasks.” As reported by Reuters, Clark said the company “cares deeply about national security” and was sharing details of Mythos with officials, with further conversations planned.
The thaw may have something to do with the hiring of one of Trump’s former close MAGA aides, Harrison Fields, our sister Substack PunchUp reports.
PunchUp has found that Anthropic has been quietly using the former Trump White House deputy press secretary as a consultant since last year.
Fields, 30, was Leavitt’s deputy from January to August 2025, handling press strategy for the Department of Justice, Treasury, Education, HUD, Energy, and DOGE portfolios.
He first entered the Trump White House in June 2020 as an assistant press secretary but left to serve as communications director for Florida Rep. Byron Donalds after Joe Biden was sworn in following Trump’s election defeat. He went on to work as assistant director of media and public relations at the Heritage Foundation before returning to the White House following Trump’s 2024 victory.
When PunchUp contacted Fields, he denied being a permanent employee. “I am not staff at Anthropic and do not lobby on the company’s behalf,” he said in a text message—without denying working as a consultant. Anthropic subsequently acknowledged the relationship, confirming Fields has been working with the company since 2024.
The Fields hire is one piece of a broader political push, as Anthropic pours money into Washington. Its quarterly lobbying bill swelled 511 percent under Trump’s second term, hitting $1.1 million by the end of 2025 from just $180,000 in early 2024, according to The Washington Examiner. On April 3, the company registered AnthroPAC with the FEC—an employee-funded political action committee backing candidates on both sides of the aisle who are active on AI policy, as reported by Axios.
The legal fight, though, is far from over. A California federal judge blocked the wider agency ban in March, but on April 8 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declined to pause the Pentagon’s blacklisting. A full hearing is scheduled for May 19.
A White House official did not comment on Anthropic’s hiring of Fields but told the Beast it “continues to work and engage with AI companies to ensure their models help secure critical software vulnerabilities to benefit the industry, and our country, as a whole.”
