Lutnick says Anthropic is back on the right side with the Trump administration

Anthropic and the Trump administration have made up, and the announcement came from the Commerce Secretary.

What Lutnick said

Howard Lutnick told Axios on September 2, 2026 that Anthropic is “back on the right side” with the administration after months of feuding over security. The dispute started when Anthropic refused to let its models be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth then blocked the company from military contracts, and federal agencies were told to stop using its products. Anthropic sued in California, and days before Lutnick’s comment a judge sided with the company against the military.

The same day on Capitol Hill

NYSE president Lynn Martin told Congress on September 2 that the exchange had used Claude Mythos through Project Glasswing to find and patch its own vulnerabilities. Mythos-class models are the ones currently finding zero-day flaws, which is the capability that made the government’s break with Anthropic costly in the first place.

What has and has not changed

As far as anyone has said publicly, Anthropic’s terms have not changed; the government’s need for the model has. The Pentagon’s new GenAI.mil platform launched this week with ChatGPT and Grok and without Claude, and Lutnick’s statement does not say whether that changes. The court ruling and the reconciliation arrived within days of each other, which suggests the practical question was settled before the public one. Whether the guardrails Anthropic insisted on survive the return to federal work is the detail to watch.