Trump says Anthropic Pentagon deal is ‘possible’, weeks after blacklisting the company as a national security risk

So President Trump has suddenly remembered Anthropic exists and thinks a Pentagon deal is 'possible', which is delightful given his own administration blacklisted the company as a national security risk just weeks ago. The U-turn is so sharp you'd get whiplash — or perhaps that's just the cognitive dissonance of running a government on vibes. 'Shaping up,' he said, as if Mythos hadn't been barred from government systems in April over those pesky cybersecurity concerns. But hey, who's counting?

The irony is, of course, that this flip-flop comes right as Anthropic's Mythos model was reportedly hacking 'faster, at greater scale' in early tests we covered last week. One minute it's too risky for the Pentagon, the next it's 'possible' — apparently national security threats have an expiration date of about a month. The Blacklist Shuffle is a great dance if you don't mind stepping on your own toes repeatedly.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is already snug as a bug in financial institutions with its 'Secure AI Shields' — because nothing says safety like the company that spent years testing safety in public. So the Pentagon might get Anthropic's red-flagged tools while the finance sector enjoys OpenAI's 'trained guards' that nobody outside has actually audited. Trump's pivot is less a policy shift and more the bureaucratic equivalent of 'I've made a terrible mistake, now let's make it someone else's problem.' The only thing 'shaping up' here is the shape of the next scandal.