Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael said Friday that while Anthropic remains a supply chain risk, Mythos, the company’s artificial intelligence model with advanced cyber capabilities, is “another national security moment.”
“I think the Mithos issue that we’re dealing with across the government, not just the Department War, is another aspect of national security and it’s time to make sure we’re hardening our networks, because that model has specialized capabilities to find and patch cyber vulnerabilities,” Michael said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday.
Michael’s comments came after a violent clash between the Pentagon and Anthropic leaked into the public domain earlier this year. The Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, meaning its technology allegedly poses a threat to U.S. national security, after the two countries failed to reach an agreement on how Anthropic’s models would be used by the agency.
For supply chain risk designation, defense contractors must demonstrate that they are not using Anthropic’s Claude model in their work with the military. Anthropic sued the Trump administration in March to remove its blacklisting from the Pentagon.
It is unclear how the Department of Defense could use Anthropic’s Mythos model without violating supply chain risk designations.
Michael said Friday that the Pentagon still wants to put guardrails in place and that they are “negotiable based on the circumstances with each company, and we have different views on that.”
On Friday, the Pentagon announced it had signed contracts with seven AI companies to deploy their technology across the agency’s classified networks for “lawful operational use.” Those companies include: googleopen AI, Nvidia, microsoft, Amazon Web ServicesSpaceX, which merged with Elon Musk’s xAI, and Reflection, a startup developing open weight models.
OpenAI announced the agreement with the Pentagon hours after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a supply chain risk in late February. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman later acknowledged in a post on X that the timing “looked opportunistic and sloppy.”
Michael’s comments on Friday show that Mithos is complicating the Pentagon’s efforts to set aside human wisdom.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met with Trump administration officials at the White House earlier this month to discuss the model. Both sides characterized the discussion as “productive.”
After the meeting, President Donald Trump told CNBC that an agreement between Anthropic and the Department of Defense is possible. President Trump said the company is “very smart” and could “help a lot.”
Despite the supply chain risk designation, the Department of Defense is using Anthropic’s model to support military efforts in the Iran war. According to Axios, Mythos is reportedly being used by the National Security Agency under the Department of Defense.
“From a national security perspective, you always have to look at those things,” Michael said Friday. “NSA and the Department of Commerce are evaluating all Frontier models, including China’s Frontier models, to see what capabilities they have at the edge.”
Anthropic’s lawsuits against the Trump administration in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are ongoing.
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