Dario Amodei

White House officials reportedly frustrated by Anthropic’s law enforcement AI limits

AI, AI ethics, AI law, AI regulation, AI security, Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Biz & IT, Claude, Dario Amodei, Department of Defense, fbi, government contracting, ice, law enforcement, machine learning, national security, openai, Policy, Secret Service, surveillance, trump administration / DJ Henderson / September 18, 2025

Anthropic’s AI models could potentially help spies analyze classified documents, but the company draws the line at domestic surveillance. That restriction is reportedly making the Trump administration angry.

On Tuesday, Semafor reported that Anthropic faces growing hostility from the Trump administration over the AI company’s restrictions on law enforcement uses of its Claude models. Two senior White House officials told the outlet that federal contractors working with agencies like the FBI and Secret Service have run into roadblocks when attempting to use Claude for surveillance tasks.

The friction stems from Anthropic’s usage policies that prohibit domestic surveillance applications. The officials, who spoke to Semafor anonymously, said they worry that Anthropic enforces its policies selectively based on politics and uses vague terminology that allows for a broad interpretation of its rules.

The restrictions affect private contractors working with law enforcement agencies who need AI models for their work. In some cases, Anthropic’s Claude models are the only AI systems cleared for top-secret security situations through Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud, according to the officials.

Anthropic offers a specific service for national security customers and made a deal with the federal government to provide its services to agencies for a nominal $1 fee. The company also works with the Department of Defense, though its policies still prohibit the use of its models for weapons development.

In August, OpenAI announced a competing agreement to supply more than 2 million federal executive branch workers with ChatGPT Enterprise access for $1 per agency for one year. The deal came one day after the General Services Administration signed a blanket agreement allowing OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to supply tools to federal workers.

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Microsoft ends OpenAI exclusivity in Office, adds rival Anthropic

AI, AI assistants, AI development tools, Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, AWS, azure, Biz & IT, Claude, copilot, Dario Amodei, GPT-5, large language models, machine learning, microsoft, Microsoft Copilot, multimodal AI, Office 365, openai / 9u50fv / September 10, 2025

Microsoft’s Office 365 suite will soon incorporate AI models from Anthropic alongside existing OpenAI technology, The Information reported, ending years of exclusive reliance on OpenAI for generative AI features across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

The shift reportedly follows internal testing that revealed Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 model excels at specific Office tasks where OpenAI’s models fall short, particularly in visual design and spreadsheet automation, according to sources familiar with the project cited by The Information, who stressed the move is not a negotiating tactic.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment.

In an unusual arrangement showing the tangled alliances of the AI industry, Microsoft will reportedly purchase access to Anthropic’s models through Amazon Web Services—both a cloud computing rival and one of Anthropic’s major investors. The integration is expected to be announced within weeks, with subscription pricing for Office’s AI tools remaining unchanged, the report says.

Microsoft maintains that its OpenAI relationship remains intact. “As we’ve said, OpenAI will continue to be our partner on frontier models and we remain committed to our long-term partnership,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters following the report. The tech giant has poured over $13 billion into OpenAI to date and is currently negotiating terms for continued access to OpenAI’s models amid ongoing negotiations about their partnership terms.

Stretching back to 2019, Microsoft’s tight partnership with OpenAI until recently gave the tech giant a head start in AI assistants based on language models, allowing for a rapid (though bumpy) deployment of OpenAI-technology-based features in Bing search and the rollout of Copilot assistants throughout its software ecosystem. It’s worth noting, however, that a recent report from the UK government found no clear productivity boost from using Copilot AI in daily work tasks among study participants.

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Anthropic CEO floats idea of giving AI a “quit job” button, sparking skepticism

AI, AI consiousness, AI ethics, Anthropic, Biz & IT, Claude, Dario Amodei, Kyle Fish, large language models, machine learning, Tech / 9u50fv / March 13, 2025

Amodei’s suggestion of giving AI models a way to refuse tasks drew immediate skepticism on X and Reddit as a clip of his response began to circulate earlier this week. One critic on Reddit argued that providing AI with such an option encourages needless anthropomorphism, attributing human-like feelings and motivations to entities that fundamentally lack subjective experiences. They emphasized that task avoidance in AI models signals issues with poorly structured incentives or unintended optimization strategies during training, rather than indicating sentience, discomfort, or frustration.

Our take is that AI models are trained to mimic human behavior from vast amounts of human-generated data. There is no guarantee that the model would “push” a discomfort button because it had a subjective experience of suffering. Instead, we would know it is more likely echoing its training data scraped from the vast corpus of human-generated texts (including books, websites, and Internet comments), which no doubt include representations of lazy, anguished, or suffering workers that it might be imitating.

Refusals already happen

A photo of co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, dated May 22, 2024. — Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei on May 22, 2024. Credit: Chesnot via Getty Images

In 2023, people frequently complained about refusals in ChatGPT that may have been seasonal, related to training data depictions of people taking winter vacations and not working as hard during certain times of year. Anthropic experienced its own version of the “winter break hypothesis” last year when people claimed Claude became lazy in August due to training data depictions of seeking a summer break, although that was never proven.

However, as far out and ridiculous as this sounds today, it might be short-sighted to permanently rule out the possibility of some kind of subjective experience for AI models as they get more advanced into the future. Even so, will they “suffer” or feel pain? It’s a highly contentious idea, but it’s a topic that Fish is studying for Anthropic, and one that Amodei is apparently taking seriously. But for now, AI models are tools, and if you give them the opportunity to malfunction, that may take place.

To provide further context, here is the full transcript of Amodei’s answer during Monday’s interview (the answer begins around 49: 54 in this video).

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Anthropic chief says AI could surpass “almost all humans at almost everything” shortly after 2027

agi, AI, AI assistants, AI investment, Amazon, Anthropic, Anthropic Claude, chatgpt, Claude, Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei, Davos, Google, machine learning, Meta, openai, sam altman, superintelligence, Wall Street Journal / Shannon Garcia / January 22, 2025

He then shared his concerns about how human-level AI models and robotics that are capable of replacing all human labor may require a complete re-think of how humans value both labor and themselves.

“We’ve recognized that we’ve reached the point as a technological civilization where the idea, there’s huge abundance and huge economic value, but the idea that the way to distribute that value is for humans to produce economic labor, and this is where they feel their sense of self worth,” he added. “Once that idea gets invalidated, we’re all going to have to sit down and figure it out.”

The eye-catching comments, similar to comments about AGI made recently by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, come as Anthropic negotiates a $2 billion funding round that would value the company at $60 billion. Amodei disclosed that Anthropic’s revenue multiplied tenfold in 2024.

Amodei distances himself from “AGI” term

Even with his dramatic predictions, Amodei distanced himself from a term for this advanced labor-replacing AI favored by Altman, “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), calling it in a separate CNBC interview from the same event in Switzerland a marketing term.

Instead, he prefers to describe future AI systems as a “country of geniuses in a data center,” he told CNBC. Amodei wrote in an October 2024 essay that such systems would need to be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields.”

On Monday, Google announced an additional $1 billion investment in Anthropic, bringing its total commitment to $3 billion. This follows Amazon’s $8 billion investment over the past 18 months. Amazon plans to integrate Claude models into future versions of its Alexa speaker.

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Amazon pours another $4B into Anthropic, OpenAI’s biggest rival

AI, Amazon, Anthropic, Biz & IT, chatgpt, chatgtp, Dario Amodei, large language models, LLMs, machine learning / DJ Henderson / November 22, 2024

Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei in 2021, will continue using Google’s cloud services along with Amazon’s infrastructure. The UK Competition and Markets Authority reviewed Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic earlier this year and ultimately determined it did not have jurisdiction to investigate further, clearing the way for the partnership to continue.

Shaking the money tree

Amazon’s renewed investment in Anthropic also comes during a time of intense competition between cloud providers Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Each company has made strategic partnerships with AI model developers—Microsoft with OpenAI (to the tune of $13 billion), Google with Anthropic (committing $2 billion over time), for example. These investments also encourage the use of each company’s data centers as demand for AI grows.

The size of these investments reflects the current state of AI development. OpenAI raised an additional $6.6 billion in October, potentially valuing the company at $157 billion. Anthropic has been eyeballing a $40 billion valuation during a recent investment round.

Training and running AI models is very expensive. While Google and Meta have their own profitable mainline businesses that can subsidize AI development, dedicated AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic need constant infusions of cash to stay afloat—in other words, this won’t be the last time we hear of billion-dollar-scale AI investments from Big Tech.

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