![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-2261852583.jpg?w=2048\")
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In 2023, as Dario Amodei was fundraising for the company\u2019s $750 million Series D round, an investor was seated with the CEO at a dinner when he recalled him getting worked up in a conversation about safety issues around artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen he was talking about the risks of AI, he contorted,\u201d says the investor. \u201cHis body twisted. He was really emotionally showing how scared he was.\u201d<\/p>\n
It made an impression on the investor, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of impact to their business, and said they believed large language models would never be successful if they weren\u2019t trustworthy.<\/p>\n
Now Anthropic\u2019s strong stance on AI safety, and its investors\u2019 commitment to that position, is being tested like never before as the company navigates a high-stakes standoff with the U.S. Department of Defense. By insisting that its Claude AI technology adhere to certain restrictions when used by the military, Anthropic has incurred the wrath of President Donald Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who have retaliated by trying to short-circuit Anthropic\u2019s business.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
For investors in Anthropic, which recently raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation and is widely expected to have an initial public stock offering soon, the government\u2019s move to designate Anthropic as a \u201csupply-chain risk\u201d could have devastating consequences.<\/p>\n
How these investors lobby Anthropic behind the scenes\u2014either pushing for conciliation or urging it to hold firm\u2014could shape the outcome of the standoff. Fortune<\/em> spoke with six people who have invested in Anthropic to get a sense of how this key constituency is feeling about the situation, and found that opinions were not unified despite the company\u2019s longstanding forthrightness about its values.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m disappointed matters of national security implications are being aired in public,\u201d says J.D. Russell, who runs the investment firm Alpha Funds, and holds a position in Anthropic. Russell said he respected Anthropic\u2019s positions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, but\u00a0said that \u201cyou have to be realistic that adversaries to the U.S. are pursuing those capabilities with far fewer constraints.\u201d<\/p>\n Jacques Tohme, managing partner of the firm Amerocap, put simply that he \u201cdid not agree\u201d with the position the company had taken.<\/p>\n Still, many of Anthropic\u2019s investors backed the company in the dispute\u2014particularly because of its disciplined stances on some of the most disputed topics in AI right now. The cofounders, after all, left OpenAI in 2021 explicitly to develop AI systems that were powerful, but also safe for humanity. Many of Anthropic\u2019s early investors also have ties to the effective altruism community, a research field focused on how to do the \u201cmost good\u201d possible, and the company has a strong investor base in Europe, which tends to be much less sympathetic to the U.S. Department of Defense.<\/p>\n One of those investors, Alberto Emprin, an investor who runs the firm 3LB Seed Capital, published his perspectives and support of Anthropic, in Italian, on Substack earlier this week, noting that Amodei, through his position, had become \u201ca kind of champion of ethics in the AI era.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAmodei\u2019s argument is, on the surface, unimpeachable: artificial intelligence is still imperfect, it makes mistakes, and the idea that due to a hallucination or a training bias the \u2018wrong person\u2019 could be killed is ethically intolerable,\u201d Emprin wrote.<\/p>\n Among the investors that Fortune<\/em> spoke to, some invested directly, while others did so via special-purpose vehicles, and one of the investors had recently sold their position on the secondary market. Ultimately, the voice of the largest investors will weigh more than the roughly 270 others on Anthropic\u2019s cap table.\u00a0 Among the largest is Amazon, whose CEO Andy Jassy, met with Hegseth recently and declined to take Anthropic\u2019s side when the matter came up, according to Semafor. Jassy has also met with Anthropic\u2019s Amodei in recent days, according to Reuters, while Lightspeed and Iconiq have reached out to other investors to explore a solution.<\/p>\n Finding consensus among Anthropic\u2019s investors may not be easy, however. While not all investors have been pleased with the hardline stance that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has taken, there\u2019s also a variety of views about how damaging the Pentagon spat could be for the company. The U.S. government contract was small, reportedly about $200 million, or roughly 1% of Anthropic\u2019s annual revenue, according to Bloomberg.<\/p>\n Russell, the Alpha Funds manager, said he didn\u2019t expect the Pentagon\u2019s move to be \u201cany real negative impact on them,\u201d as it\u2019s \u201creally just one contract.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Depending on how the supply chain risk designation is interpreted, however (Anthropic is widely expected to fight it in court), it could lead to broader fallout by forcing any company doing business with the DoD to stop using Anthropic products. Other federal agencies, including the State Department and Treasury Department, have also said they will no longer use Anthropic.<\/p>\n On the flip side, some Anthropic investors say they\u2019re heartened by the surge in goodwill the company has reaped by standing firm on its principles. Patrick Hable, an investor who runs the firm 3 Comma Capital, said he believed the whole issue would be a \u201cnet positive\u201d for the company. \u201cContracts lost but millions of supporters won,\u201d he said. But he added that \u201cEven if that would be a net negative, he [did] the right thing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In the days since the Pentagon announced a deal with OpenAI instead of Anthropic, Anthropic became the most downloaded app in the Apple and Android app stores. And Anthropic had the most user signups ever on Monday, the company said. <\/p>\n As Amodei reportedly told employees in a lengthy internal memo published by the Information that criticizes Sam Altman of OpenAI and explaining the fallout with the Defense Department, the public is seeing Anthropic \u201cas the heroes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Anthropics #investors #divided #dispute #Pentagon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 2023, as Dario Amodei was f… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[704,10286,516,13177,3432,903,9374,92,703,10304,1803,1571],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26741"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How bad could it get?<\/strong><\/h2>\n