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This report is from this week's The Tech Download newsletter. Like what you see? You can subscribe here. Anthropic and OpenAI are poaching officials from the Trump administration for senior roles as the AI sector scrambles to strengthen ties to Washington, with frontier tech increasingly viewed as a national security issue. This year, Anthropic has appointed at least two former Trump officials, one to its board and another as the head of its frontier compute strategy. OpenAI has hired at least three from the president’s administrations to work across strategy and special projects. Companies developing frontier AI have been racing to build relationships with the U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House, amid growing calls for regulation and in the wake of a number of cybersecurity incidents caused by rogue AI systems. "Frontier AI companies are aware that the Trump administration has a lot of levers over their business, from federal procurement and supply-chain designations to export controls and everything in between, and that it's willing to use them," said Michelle Nie Duncan, visiting fellow with the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security. "They have learned from the Anthropic episode that it pays to be on the good side of the White House," she told CNBC. A U.S. appeals court upheld a Pentagon designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk in September, after a public spat between the two parties at the start of the year. OpenAI directed CNBC to previously released statements about two of its former Trump official appointments when approached for comment. Anthropic and the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Ties to Trump While Trump has called AI safety concerns a "hoax" and advocated for self-regulation from AI companies, he has also said the Department of Justice and other law enforcement bodies could "rein" in AI. Anthropic, in particular, has had a particularly antagonistic relationship with the Trump administration this year, but CEO Dario Amodei has looked to smooth his relationship with the U.S. president in recent times. He joined a lunch between Trump and AI bosses as well as dining with Trump in September. Sihao Huang joined Amodei's AI lab in September as head of frontier compute strategy. He was previously a senior policy advisor for AI and emerging technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Huang's website states that he was responsible for leading the "AI team at OSTP & coordinating national security, science policy, and semiconductor issues." He'll be working on Anthropic's infrastructure expansion and "planning for rapid AI progress," Huang said in a post on X in September. The company appointed Chris Liddell, who served as the deputy White House chief of staff during Trump's first term, to its board of directors in February. Anthropic has been racing to ink AI data center deals big and small as it looks to secure the infrastructure it needs to train and serve its models. Anthropic had struck a roughly $45 billion cloud deal with neocloud Nscale, CNBC reported in August. Leverage Both Anthropic and OpenAI are also currently hiring for multiple political engagements roles. "With companies like OpenAI and Anthropic gearing up for some of the largest IPOs of all time, many also see this as a chance to be part of something historic," said Nie Duncan, adding that the companies are often able to offer attractive compensation packages beyond what would be possible in the public sector. "The AI labs are becoming some of the most consequential institutions in the world, and for officials who are serious about shaping the future of AI governance, inside the labs is where a lot of leverage currently lies." OpenAI confirmed last week that Thomas Lind, who had led AI policy at the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD), has joined the company to lead on cyber and strategic risk on its national security policy team. The ONCD is the principal advisor to the president on cybersecurity policy and strategy. "[Lind's] expertise is even more important as AI becomes central to the national security agenda, with the Office of the National Cyber Director playing a growing role in shaping AI policy," said Sasha Baker, who leads OpenAI's national security policy team and served as deputy under secretary of defense for policy in the Biden Administration. Dean Ball, who served as a senior policy advisor at OSTP in 2025 and was involved in drafting the Trump administration's flagship America's AI Action Plan, joined OpenAI in July as head of strategic futures. Ball will "help us pressure-test our assumptions and think through issues ranging from frontier safety and the economic impacts of increasingly capable systems to the evolving relationship between governments, companies, and society," said OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. OpenAI also hired Peter Bowman-Davis to work on model training and hardware engineering in March, according to his LinkedIn page. He previously served as Chief AI officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. News edit A Ukrainian drone strike caused Russian internet giant Yandex to suspend operations at one of its key data centers on Thursday. AI agent startup Manus has raised more than $500 million in its first funding round since Meta was forced to abandon its acquisition of the company. Apollo and several banks are in talks to finance SpaceX's $40 billion Nvidia GPU purchase, a source told CNBC. Google has been ordered to halt work on two data centers it's developing in Finland, a month after the tech giant committed to investing $15 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the country. Mistral on Tuesday unveiled a new AI model it said ranked among the best open models in the world, as Western companies race to close the capability gap with Chinese developers in the market. One more thing Microsoft is one of the most valuable tech companies in the world with a market cap approaching $4 trillion. Under CEO Satya Nadella, the tech giant has continued its ascent as a software and cloud powerhouse. But, as my colleague Jordan Novet writes, almost four years into the AI boom, Microsoft has yet to find a breakout hit at the model or application layer.
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