Anthropic cofounder Tom Brown, a Republican who runs the company’s compute deals, has become its main go-between with the Trump administration and Elon Musk as Anthropic heads toward an IPO that could value it above $2 trillion, according to the Wall Street Journal. After the White House made Anthropic shut off two models in June, Brown ended the weeks-long standoff that Dario Amodei couldn’t, by convincing officials at the Commerce Department, the Pentagon, and the White House that the company had tightened its safeguards. In March he met Musk at SpaceX and argued Anthropic was less “woke” than Musk thought, which paved the way for Anthropic’s $1.25 billion-a-month deal to rent SpaceX computing capacity. But the Pentagon still labels Anthropic a security risk and bars contractors from using its tools.
