Lutnick Says Anthropic Has Patched Relations With US Government

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that Anthropic PBC has patched its relationship with the Trump administration, signaling a possible end to months of sharp differences over security between the US and the artificial intelligence developer.

“We had a good kerfuffle, it was out there,” Lutnick said in a Bloomberg Television interview Wednesday on the sidelines of a Group of 20 tech event in North Carolina. “But they’ve gotten religion.”

Lutnick’s comments offered the strongest indication yet that ties with the company have improved following a Commerce Department decision in June to briefly impose export controls on the firm’s top two AI models. Those curbs on the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 systems were lifted two weeks later after Anthropic took steps to address the administration’s national security concerns.

The Commerce chief said that President Donald Trump and other officials had helped to bridge the gap with the company and win its support for administration policies. “They were a little confused about the topic but we sorted that out,” the Commerce chief said, without elaborating. “We’re all in tune together.”

Spokespeople for Anthropic and the Commerce Department had no immediate comment when asked for more detail.

Anthropic in recent weeks has been laying the groundwork for an initial public offering that could match or beat the size of SpaceX’s record-setting IPO.

Read More: Anthropic Wins Court Challenge to US Supply-Chain Risk Label

In a sign that relations have improved, Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown appeared with Lutnick for a fireside chat at Wednesday’s G20 event, where he endorsed Trump’s call for building more AI infrastructure. Brown, who’s serves as the company’s head of AI compute, said he “really loved” the president’s social media post this week defending data center projects as a source of prosperity.

It’s unclear whether the thaw between the administration and Anthropic extends to the Defense Department, which earlier this year declared the company a supply-chain risk and moved to end military use of the firm’s AI tools.

That dispute, touched off by the firm’s insistence on additional safeguards for its products, prompted a lawsuit by Anthropic to overturn the supply-chain risk designation. Last week, the company won a key victory in the case when a federal judge in San Francisco sided with Anthropic and ordered the government to lift its ban.

Spokespeople for the Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.