Unsealed emails: Anthropic-Pentagon guardrail talks were 'very close' the day of the blacklist

Court documents filed July 2 show DoD Under Secretary Emil Michael called Anthropic's red lines 'just not workable' hours before Hegseth designated the company a supply-chain risk.

The email chain unsealed on July 2 in the Northern District of California and embedded in full by Gizmodo, after the Wall Street Journal broke it, shows Department of War Under Secretary Emil Michael telling Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei he was “hoping that we are closer to engaging with your revised POV” and asking for “one more chance to align on core principles.” The next day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk.

That designation is, per Congressional Research Service report IN12669, a statutory label typically reserved for firms tied to foreign adversaries. It was applied to what CRS itself calls “the Department’s most widely deployed and used frontier AI model.” Claude had reportedly supported intelligence analysis, operational planning, and the January 2026 operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The substantive disagreement, on paper, was narrow. Anthropic held two red lines: no fully autonomous weapons and no mass domestic surveillance. Michael called them “just not workable,” writing that there’s “no distinction in our world between weapons that are defensive or offensive.” Amodei responded that the Pentagon’s counter-draft would “completely remove our redlines.”

Then the machinery moved fast. Hegseth’s designation opened a six-month transition. President Trump directed all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic technology on February 27. Anthropic filed complaints in N.D. Cal. and the D.C. Circuit on March 9. A district court issued a preliminary injunction on March 26.

One detail, flagged by Gizmodo and The Next Web, complicates the good-faith reading of Michael’s “one more chance” framing: the former Uber executive held xAI stock during the talks.

Amodei’s public position, issued the same week the emails surfaced, is that “we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.” The court file suggests the request wasn’t a request.