The Pentagon may reverse its stance on Anthropic after President Donald Trump revealed "very good talks" with the AI company at the White House, signaling a dramatic policy shift that could unlock military applications for Claude models. This development follows months of conflict where the Defense Department labeled Anthropic a national security threat and banned contractors from using its technology, marking a potential watershed moment for AI defense contracts.

Pentagon keeps using Claude while Anthropic fights the blacklist and reopens talks

That hard line did not fully hold. The Pentagon kept using Claude during the war with Iran. Anthropic later sued the Trump administration in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., to reverse the blacklist.

Trump’s Truth Social directive has also been temporarily blocked by a federal judge. Talks between both sides then started opening again. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei met senior administration officials on Friday to discuss Mythos, the company’s new AI model with cybersecurity capabilities. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent attended that meeting.

A White House spokesperson allegedly called the discussion “productive and constructive.” Earlier this month, Anthropic announced Mythos and limited its release to a small group of companies because of the model’s cyber power. The company said it has been holding “ongoing discussions” with U.S. government officials about Mythos.

Mythos arrived after the worst point of Anthropic’s dispute with the DOD. The launch appears to have reopened the door to better ties with the administration.

Dario also joined an early April call with Bessent and Vice President JD Vance to discuss AI cyber readiness alongside other major tech CEOs. Anthropic signed a $200 million Pentagon contract in July, but negotiations over deploying Claude on the DOD’s GenAI.mil platform collapsed in September.

Banks rush toward Mythos as Anthropic prepares a wider European rollout

The company is facing pressure outside Washington too. In New York and Paris on April 21, Reuters reported that Anthropic plans to give European banks access to Mythos soon, citing three people familiar with the matter.

This comes as banks scramble to test the model after large U.S. banks received the first access. Cybersecurity experts see Mythos as a challenge for banks and their old technology systems, and those fears drove warnings from regulators and policymakers at last week’s International Monetary Fund spring meeting in Washington.

Scott Keipper, EY’s Americas Financial Services Technology Consulting Leader, said the speed of the technology is outrunning the governance, operating models, and control systems most banks were built to handle.

He said that the gap is widening the distance between finding risk and fixing it. Keipper also said banks need to move past one-time cybersecurity fixes and instead build AI into risk management across technology, operations, governance, and oversight.

One person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Anthropic wants to expand Mythos access to European and UK banks, along with other organizations. That person said security checks are part of the rollout process.

Another person allegedly said European banks could get access within days, while the first person said the timeline could still take days or weeks. Bloomberg had already reported that Anthropic was preparing to release Mythos to UK financial institutions soon.

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