The White House is drafting an executive order that would let federal agencies bypass the Pentagon's supply chain risk designation on Anthropic — effectively allowing them to buy the company's models, including its flagship Mythos, once again. People familiar with the matter say the administration wants to "gracefully bring Anthropic back."
Earlier this month, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Both sides described the conversation as "productive." This week, the White House also convened a multi-industry meeting to discuss best practices for deploying Mythos, and ran through tabletop exercises on a possible withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) ban.
The conflict traces back to February. Anthropic refused to sign a Pentagon agreement allowing Claude to be used for "all lawful purposes," insisting on two red lines: no mass domestic surveillance and no fully autonomous weapons. Defense Secretary Hegseth responded on March 3 by designating Anthropic a supply chain risk — the first time the US government has ever applied that label to a domestic company. President Trump himself posted on social media at the time, "we won't do business with them anymore."
But federal demand for Mythos is too strong to ignore. The NSA is already using it, and multiple cabinet-level agencies are waiting in line.
OpenAI, which recently released GPT-5.5, and Google both signed the Pentagon's "all lawful purposes" agreement. Both companies claim the agreement actually respects the same two red lines Anthropic drew. Even if the new executive order takes effect, hawks inside the Pentagon aren't backing down. The core disagreement remains unresolved, and the two sides could soon be back at an impasse.