The White House Wants Mythos Despite the Blacklist, and Every Major Agent Benchmark Is Broken

We covered the Anthropic-Pentagon conflict on April 11, when OpenAI and Google workers filed an amicus brief supporting Anthropic. Here is what happened since.

The White House Office of Management and Budget is setting up protections to allow major federal agencies to begin using Anthropic's Mythos model, according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg. Federal CIO Gregory Barbaccia emailed Cabinet department officials on Tuesday outlining the plan. Separately, staff from at least two large federal agencies have reached out to Anthropic directly to express interest in integrating Mythos into their cyber defense efforts, according to Politico. The Treasury Department has been seeking access to assess its own software vulnerabilities. (Reuters · Bloomberg · Politico)

The contradiction is now explicit. The Pentagon labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk and barred all use of Claude. A federal appeals court declined to lift that designation. Yet the White House is simultaneously preparing to deploy Anthropic's most capable model across the very government the Pentagon designation was meant to protect. Dean Ball, co-author of the Trump White House AI Action Plan, told The Hill that administration officials are "coming to the realization" that AI development has not plateaued as some predicted. The model's ability to autonomously discover and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system has created a situation where the national security argument for using Mythos may outweigh the political argument for punishing the company that built it.

Governance signal: The gap between the Pentagon's supply chain risk designation and the White House's deployment plans is a policy contradiction that will need resolution. Watch whether the courts or the executive branch resolves it first.

Investment signal: Anthropic's defensive positioning (safety-first, limited release, responsible disclosure) is now generating demand from the very institutions that were supposed to be cutting ties. The company's leverage is increasing, not decreasing.