The Other Anthropic Founder Trying to Fix the Company’s ‘Woke’ Reputation

Call him Anthropic’s chief problem solver.

Tom Brown, who was one of the original six to found Anthropic with Dario Amodei, is parlaying his background negotiating deals for the chips needed to train AI models into something even more valuable: the business and political alliances Anthropic needs to pull off an initial public offering that could value it north of $2 trillion.

Where Amodei’s doomy warnings of AI’s risks have frustrated some administration officials, who worry that any pause or excessive regulation threatens to scuttle America’s lead against China, Brown has found common ground. He made peace with Elon Musk, a rival who had once called Anthropic “smug, sanctimonious and hypocritical.”

When the White House forced Anthropic to shut off all access to two of its models due to security concerns, Amodei dispatched his chief compute officer to negotiate with the Trump administration after his own efforts fell short. Brown, a Republican, ended the two-and-a-half-week June standoff by assuring Commerce Department, Pentagon and White House officials that Anthropic understood their security fears and had upgraded its safeguards.

The 6-foot-6 executive posed for a photo last week at a White House summit feting America’s advances in AI, posing shoulder to shoulder with technology CEOs and a president that has previously lambasted Anthropic as “woke.”

His friendlier relationship with the administration was seen by some observers as one factor helping Amodei secure his first lengthy face-to-face meeting with Trump, a late September dinner at the White House after which he earned praise from the president. Amodei also attended last week’s lunch, making Anthropic one of two companies with a pair of executives in attendance.

Brown bought a house in Washington earlier this year with his wife, a startup co-founder and former venture investor named Michelle Valentine. The couple has said in private conversations that they are allies of the Republican party and want to establish relationships in Washington, people familiar with the matter said.

Brown has supported the aggressive U.S. build-out of data centers and nuclear energy projects, a White House priority but an undertaking increasingly unpopular among Americans. Anthropic continues to need more computing power as it amasses users and models advance.

Brown said at a G-20 tech summit last month that he “really loved” a post by Trump on Truth Social that said communities that don’t embrace data centers risk becoming “backwards and poor.”

“He was pointing out that the data centers are just an enormous source of prosperity,” Brown said of the post.

“He is increasingly playing the dual role of founder and diplomat,” said Joseph Hoefer, chief AI officer at lobbying firm Monument Advocacy, which represents tech companies but not Anthropic.

His intense negotiating style masks his soft side as a father to a one-year old son, people who work with Brown say. When a colleague introduced him to their three-year-old, Brown put the boy on his shoulders and walked him around the room.

Brown grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, then studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked for a host of startups and participated in startup incubator Y Combinator. A self-described “awkward kid,” Brown has said he briefly worked on a group dating app called Grouper to help people like him “talk to girls.”

Brown began learning about AI through online courses and math textbooks after reading “Superintelligence” by Nick Bostrom, a popular book in AI circles exploring what it says are existential dangers for humans from the creation of machines that are smarter than humans.He offered to mop the floors at OpenAI to get his foot in the door. Shortly afterward, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, with whom he had become friendly, hired Brown as one of the startup’s first 20 employees.

There, Brown met Musk, the lab’s main funder at the time. During one of Musk’s visits in 2016, Brown watched in panic as Musk savaged a demonstration from a legendary researcher. But when it was Brown’s turn to show off his work, Musk said he liked Brown’s tool that let an AI play the videogame StarCraft, according to people familiar with the matter.

The encounter would end up paving the way to a pivotal computing deal between the two men’s companies a decade later.

Brown was laid off from OpenAI, then briefly joined Google’s DeepMind lab. Amodei brought him back to OpenAI in 2018, and he led engineering work on GPT-3. The breakthrough model demonstrated one of the central tenets underpinning the AI boom: that capabilities would increase when models were trained on more data.

He joined Amodei and five other OpenAI leaders to create Anthropic at the start of 2021.

Brown’s main job in the early days of the company was securing the chips and computing power needed to train and run Anthropic’s models. While OpenAI had primarily relied on Nvidia chips through its partnership with Microsoft, Brown and Anthropic’s co-founders sought to work with other companies to make the company less dependent on a single supplier.

When the early 2023 launch of Anthropic’s Claude models to compete with ChatGPT increased the need for computing power, Brown orchestrated deals with Google and Amazon.

As Anthropic leapt ahead in the AI race and its models gained traction with businesses, the company’s computing capacity wasn’t able to keep up and customers faced usage limits and outages.

Brown turned to Musk, whose SpaceX had excess capacity at its massive data center complexes after acquiring xAI. It was a tender time: Musk had spent months railing against Anthropic after it cut off xAI’s access to Claude Code, calling it “smug, sanctimonious and hypocritical” on X and giving it the nickname “Misanthropic.”

But Brown saw that Musk and Anthropic ultimately had an opportunity to help each other. He drove to SpaceX’s offices in Hawthorne, Calif., in late March and told Musk that Anthropic wasn’t as “woke” as he thought, while acknowledging that some of its past models had been, according to people familiar with the matter.

In early May, Anthropic and SpaceX announced that Anthropic would rent SpaceX’s compute for $1.25 billion a month. To keep up with competitors, Anthropic has also signed agreements worth tens of billions of dollars with Advanced Micro Devices and a trio of smaller companies in recent weeks.

Amodei sent Brown to put that diplomatic dexterity to work in Washington.

The company clashed with the Defense Department earlier this year about the right guardrails for AI models when they are used by the military. The Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a security risk is still in place.

Brown has regular conversations with Emil Michael, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, but the Pentagon has barred all usage of Anthropic’s tools and told contractors to stop using them, a move that has been upheld in one court and struck down in another.

Brown taking charge of the June model shutdown in Washington allowed Amodei to focus on customer relationships and other CEO responsibilities, a person familiar with the matter said. During that time, Brown and Amodei spoke daily on the phone, the person said.

In recent weeks Brown has held regular discussions with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Michael Kratsios, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, about Anthropic’s models and AI safety.

During last month’s G-20, Brown was seen talking casually with Lutnick and officials from other countries at the Carolina Inn on the University of North Carolina’s campus, with some in the group smoking cigars.

On stage at the event, Lutnick asked Brown what the future holds for AI. Brown said he expects major progress on curing cancer and benefiting the economy in the next five years, echoing claims from Amodei.

“Looking back we’ll be like, ‘Wow, back in 2026 we thought stuff was going fast and we thought we were seeing this, but actually we underestimated how impactful this would be and what the progress would be,’” Brown said.