Technology

Pentagon CTO rules out resolution with Anthropic, calls Mythos a broader ‘cyber moment’

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by Miranda Nazzaro - 05/07/26 2:09 PM ET

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by Miranda Nazzaro - 05/07/26 2:09 PM ET

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One of the Pentagon’s top technology leaders ruled out any reconciliation with Anthropic, despite the White House softening its own tone on the AI company.

“Never again will we be single-threaded with any one model,” Emil Michael, under secretary of Defense for research and engineering, said Thursday in a fireside chat at the AI+ Expo in Washington.

“We were singled-threaded with Anthropic,” he added.

The comment came after David Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, asked Michael whether the Department of Defense’s (DOD) conflict with Anthropic could eventually be resolved and if the AI firm would be able to sign a deal for its models to be deployed in classified networks.

Eight companies, including Microsoft, Google and xAI, signed similar deals last week.

When Sanger brought up whether Anthropic could be part of these deals one day, Michael said, “not at the Department of War.”

Just more than two months have passed since the Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic from its military work after a dispute with the company over the potential use of its AI models for domestic surveillance or fully autonomous attacks.

As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved to ban Anthropic from the Pentagon, President Trump took a step further and told civilian agencies to stop using its products as well.

Michael pointed to the complications that come with integrating, and eventually, pulling out an AI vendor like Anthropic from the DOD’s classified networks, which at the time was one of the only AI models approved for sensitive work.

“To integrate into a classified systems is not just putting your software on a public cloud and having it work, these are sophisticated protective systems that take a lot of work to integrate on,” Michael said. “So it wasn’t like I could just turn on a few other models that easily.”

But while the Pentagon has dug its heels in against Anthropic, the White House, including Trump, has softened its tone on the company.

“They’re very smart, and I think they can be of great use. I like smart people, I like high-IQ people and they definitely have high IQs,” the president said of Anthropic’s team. “I think we’ll get along with them just fine.”

The release of Mythos, Anthropic’s newest cybersecurity model, seems to have stirred various conversations between the company and the White House.

Mythos, according to Anthropic, is capable of detecting decades-old vulnerabilities in web browsers, infrastructure and software.

Several administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and reportedly White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, spoke with Anthropic and other technology companies about the benefits and risks of Mythos.

When asked about the White House’s recent moves in the wake of Mythos, Michael framed the model’s release as a statement about larger cybersecurity threats.

“There’s a conceptual and a natural separation between Mythos, which is really just an example of the upcoming evolution of cyber capable models, just slightly ahead,” Michael said, adding these models “tend to converge over time.”

“The Mythos moment is really a cyber moment, and it’s how is the U.S. government going to deal with cyber. How do we operationalize fixing things that need to be fixed?” he added.

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