Anthropic’s investors could be the key to ending its Pentagon standoff—but some investors have opposite views

In 2023, as Dario Amodei was fundraising for the company’s $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.

“When he was talking about the risks of AI, he contorted,” says the investor. “His body twisted. He was really emotionally showing how scared he was.”

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’t trustworthy.

Now Anthropic’s strong stance on AI safety, and its investors’ 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’s business.  

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’s move to designate Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk” could have devastating consequences.

How these investors lobby Anthropic behind the scenes—either pushing for conciliation or urging it to hold firm—could shape the outcome of the standoff. Fortune 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’s longstanding forthrightness about its values.

“I’m disappointed matters of national security implications are being aired in public,” says J.D. Russell, who runs the investment firm Alpha Funds, and holds a position in Anthropic. Russell said he respected Anthropic’s positions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, but said that “you have to be realistic that adversaries to the U.S. are pursuing those capabilities with far fewer constraints.”

Jacques Tohme, managing partner of the firm Amerocap, put simply that he “did not agree” with the position the company had taken.

Still, many of Anthropic’s investors backed the company in the dispute—particularly 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’s early investors also have ties to the effective altruism community, a research field focused on how to do the “most good” 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.

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 “a kind of champion of ethics in the AI era.”

“Amodei’s 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 ‘wrong person’ could be killed is ethically intolerable,” Emprin wrote.

Among the investors that Fortune 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’s cap table.  Among the largest is Amazon, whose CEO Andy Jassy, met with Hegseth recently and declined to take Anthropic’s side when the matter came up, according to Semafor. Jassy has also met with Anthropic’s Amodei in recent days, according to Reuters, while Lightspeed and Iconiq have reached out to other investors to explore a solution.

How bad could it get?

Finding consensus among Anthropic’s 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’s 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’s annual revenue, according to Bloomberg.

Russell, the Alpha Funds manager, said he didn’t expect the Pentagon’s move to be “any real negative impact on them,” as it’s “really just one contract.” 

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.

On the flip side, some Anthropic investors say they’re 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 “net positive” for the company. “Contracts lost but millions of supporters won,” he said. But he added that “Even if that would be a net negative, he [did] the right thing,” he said.

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.

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 “as the heroes.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com