Amodei Calls Brockman's $25M Trump Donation 'Evil'

"Evil." That's the word Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei used to describe OpenAI president Greg Brockman's $25 million donation to MAGA Inc, Trump's primary super PAC. Not "misguided." Not "unfortunate." Evil.

What Happened

The characterization comes from an internal letter obtained and published by The Information, in which Amodei laid out his view of why the Trump administration has turned hostile toward Anthropic. The letter is blunt in a way that tech executives almost never are publicly — and it names names.

Brockman and his wife gave $25 million to MAGA Inc and another $25 million to "Leading the Future," an AI-focused super PAC. Sam Altman contributed $1 million to Trump's inauguration. Amodei framed these donations as the core reason his company is being punished while OpenAI gets favorable treatment.

"The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven't donated to Trump, while OpenAI and Greg have donated a lot," Amodei wrote, using the Pentagon's current self-designation as the "Department of War." He added that Anthropic also hasn't "given dictator-style praise to Trump, while Sam has."

The letter went further. Amodei accused OpenAI of "safety theater" in its Department of Defense work, claiming their safeguards "mostly do not work." He called OpenAI's public messaging about the Pentagon conflict "mendacious" — a polite way of saying they're lying.

Anthropic, for its part, isn't sitting out politics entirely. The company donated $20 million to Public First Action PAC, which advocates for AI guardrails and regulation. But that's a different kind of political spending than writing eight-figure checks to a presidential super PAC, and Amodei clearly sees the distinction as fundamental.

Why This Matters

The letter pulls back the curtain on what the Wall Street Journal recently called "The Decadelong Feud Shaping the Future of AI." The rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI has always had a philosophical dimension — Amodei and other Anthropic founders left OpenAI over safety disagreements — but the political dimension is newer and more volatile.

The timing matters. Anthropic was recently labeled a supply chain risk by the Pentagon, a designation a federal judge just blocked as "arbitrary and capricious." The company also dealt with an embarrassing leak of internal documents revealing its next-generation model. And OpenAI is dealing with its own turbulence as it restructures product lines.

Amodei's letter argues Anthropic is being punished for three things: supporting AI regulation, telling the truth about job displacement from AI, and holding safety red lines that other companies have quietly dropped. Whether you see that as principled or self-serving depends on your view of the company — but the claim that political donations are buying preferential treatment from the administration is hard to dismiss as paranoia when the dollar amounts are this large.

What's Next

The letter was internal, which means Amodei either expected it to leak or didn't care if it did. Either way, the gloves are off. The AI industry's biggest companies are no longer just competing on benchmarks and pricing — they're competing for political favor, and the cost of entry keeps rising. For Claude and Anthropic, the question is whether being right about safety matters if being generous to the right people matters more.