Tom Brown leads Anthropic's Trump administration outreach

Brown ended June model-access standoff, helped seal SpaceX compute deal

Tom Brown, an Anthropic co-founder and the company’s chief compute officer, has emerged as the AI startup’s lead negotiator with the Trump administration as it prepares for an initial public offering that could value it north of $2 trillion, The Wall Street Journal reported. Brown, a Republican, ended a 2½-week June standoff when the White House forced Anthropic to shut off all access to two of its models over security concerns, after Amodei’s own negotiations with administration officials fell short, the Journal reported. Brown assured Commerce Department, Pentagon and White House officials that Anthropic understood their security fears and had upgraded its safeguards. Brown’s management of the model-access standoff in Washington allowed Amodei to focus on customer relationships and other CEO duties, a person familiar with the matter said; Brown and Amodei spoke daily on the phone during that period, the person said.

Amodei’s pessimistic warnings about AI’s risks have frustrated some administration officials, who worry that any pause or excessive regulation threatens to scuttle America’s lead against China, the Journal reported. Trump has previously criticized Anthropic as “woke.” Brown, by contrast, has found common ground with the administration on a White House priority: the aggressive U.S. build-out of data centers and nuclear energy projects, an undertaking the Journal said is increasingly unpopular among Americans.

At a G-20 tech summit last month, Brown said he “really loved” a Truth Social post by Trump asserting that communities that do not embrace data centers risk becoming “backwards and poor.” “He was pointing out that the data centers are just an enormous source of prosperity,” Brown said of the post.

The 6-foot-6 executive posed for a photo last week at a White House summit on America’s AI advances, standing alongside other technology CEOs and Trump. His friendlier relationship with the administration was seen by some observers as one factor helping Amodei secure his first lengthy face-to-face meeting with Trump, a late-September dinner at the White House after which Trump praised the CEO. Amodei also attended last week’s lunch, making Anthropic one of two companies with a pair of executives in attendance, according to the Journal.

“He is increasingly playing the dual role of founder and diplomat,” Joseph Hoefer, chief AI officer at lobbying firm Monument Advocacy, which represents tech companies but not Anthropic, told the Journal.

Brown bought a house in Washington earlier this year with his wife, Michelle Valentine, a startup co-founder and former venture investor, the Journal reported. People familiar with the matter said the couple has described themselves in private conversations as Republican allies seeking to establish relationships in the capital. People who work with Brown said his intense negotiating style masks a softer side as a father to a one-year-old son; when a colleague introduced Brown to their three-year-old, Brown put the boy on his shoulders and walked him around the room, the Journal reported.

Brown grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Journal reported. He worked for a series of startups and participated in startup incubator Y Combinator. A self-described “awkward kid,” Brown has said he briefly worked on a group dating app called Grouper to help people like him “talk to girls.”

Brown began learning about AI through online courses and math textbooks after reading “Superintelligence” by Nick Bostrom. He offered to mop the floors at OpenAI to get his foot in the door. OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, with whom he had become friendly, hired Brown as one of the startup’s first 20 employees. There, Brown met Musk, the lab’s main funder at the time. During one of Musk’s visits in 2016, Brown watched in panic as Musk savaged a demonstration from a legendary researcher. But when it was Brown’s turn to show off his work, Musk said he liked Brown’s tool that let an AI play the videogame StarCraft, according to people familiar with the matter. The encounter would end up paving the way to a pivotal computing deal between the two men’s companies a decade later, the Journal reported.

Brown was later laid off from OpenAI, briefly joined Google’s DeepMind lab, then returned to OpenAI in 2018 at Amodei’s invitation, where he led engineering work on GPT-3. He joined Amodei and five other OpenAI leaders to create Anthropic at the start of 2021.

His main job in Anthropic’s early days was securing the chips and computing power needed to train and run the company’s models, the Journal reported. OpenAI had primarily relied on Nvidia chips through its partnership with Microsoft, while Brown and Anthropic’s co-founders sought to work with other companies to make Anthropic less dependent on a single supplier. When Anthropic launched its Claude models in early 2023 to compete with ChatGPT, Brown orchestrated compute deals with Google and Amazon.

As Anthropic’s models gained traction with businesses, the company’s computing capacity could not keep up, and customers faced usage limits and outages. Brown turned to Musk, whose SpaceX had excess capacity at its massive data center complexes after acquiring xAI. It was a tender time: Musk had spent months railing against Anthropic after it cut off xAI’s access to Claude Code, calling it “smug, sanctimonious and hypocritical” on X and giving it the nickname “Misanthropic.”

According to people familiar with the matter, Brown drove to SpaceX’s offices in Hawthorne, Calif., in late March and told Musk that Anthropic was not as “woke” as Musk had thought, while acknowledging that some past models had been. In early May, Anthropic and SpaceX announced that Anthropic would rent SpaceX’s compute for $1.25 billion a month. To keep up with competitors, Anthropic has also signed agreements worth tens of billions of dollars with Advanced Micro Devices and three smaller companies in recent weeks.

Amodei sent Brown to put that diplomatic dexterity to work in Washington. The company clashed with the Defense Department earlier this year about the right guardrails for AI models when they are used by the military, and the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a security risk remains in place, according to the Journal. Brown has regular conversations with Emil Michael, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, but the Pentagon has barred all usage of Anthropic’s tools and told contractors to stop using them, a move that has been upheld in one court and struck down in another.

Brown has also held regular discussions with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Michael Kratsios, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, about Anthropic’s models and AI safety. At last month’s G-20, Brown was seen talking casually with Lutnick and officials from other countries at the Carolina Inn on the University of North Carolina’s campus, with some in the group smoking cigars. Onstage, Lutnick asked Brown what the future holds for AI. Brown said he expects major progress on curing cancer and benefiting the economy in the next five years, echoing claims from Amodei.

“Looking back we’ll be like, ‘Wow, back in 2026 we thought stuff was going fast and we thought we were seeing this, but actually we underestimated how impactful this would be and what the progress would be,’” Brown said.