Tuesday, September 29, 2026 |
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The Last Page.
The last page, first.
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Why Did Trump Have Dinner With the Man His Pentagon Blacklisted?
Two days after the Pentagon beat Anthropic in court, the President sat down with its chief executive at ten o’clock at night. The company is also getting ready for a stock listing reported to be worth close to $2 trillion.
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The story
President Trump had dinner with Dario Amodei at the White House at ten o’clock on Sunday night. Amodei runs Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models.
Two days earlier a federal appeals court sided with the Pentagon against him. Two to one. It upheld the Defense Department’s label on Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, which bars the military from using its models.
The fight began in February, when Anthropic refused to let its tools run fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. Amodei said then that he “cannot in good conscience” accept the Pentagon’s terms.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth answered Friday’s ruling in one line: “The @DeptofWar does what is right for the Country and our Warriors.” Two days later his boss called Amodei “very highly respected.”
This one ends in your 401(k) either way. Amazon and Google own large stakes in Anthropic, and every S&P 500 index fund owns Amazon and Google.
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Anthropic filed its paperwork to go public in private this June. Wall Street’s pre-IPO chase is already on.
After taking SpaceX public in the biggest IPO ever, Elon Musk is already working with a NEW startup that’s growing faster than Tesla…
Faster than SpaceX… And faster than any of Elon Musk’s previous ventures.
Bloomberg has just confirmed that this startup is moving towards “a blockbuster IPO.”
And Jeff Brown will also show you how to claim a pre-IPO stake for as little as $50.
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Best case
DECEMBER 2026. The label came off in a settlement that neither side called a surrender. Anthropic kept its line on mass surveillance, and the Pentagon got a version of Claude its lawyers could sign.
The paperwork went public a few weeks later. Wall Street had been waiting for a clean risk section, and it got one. Friday’s two-to-one ruling became a footnote.
Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in May, and the talk around the listing ran close to $2 trillion. Google owns about 14 percent of it. Fortune estimates Amazon’s stake in the mid-to-high teens.
Your index fund never bought a share of Anthropic. It got paid anyway, through the two companies that own the biggest pieces of it.
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Worst case
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FEBRUARY 2027. A year after the fight began, the label is still on. The dinner produced a photograph and a polite readout, and nothing in the Pentagon’s files moved.
Contractors that sell to the military started asking their software vendors one new question. Is there Claude inside? Some pulled it out to be safe, before an auditor could ask.
The listing slipped into spring. A company fighting the Defense Department has to warn every buyer in its risk section, and the bankers priced that in. OpenAI, whose chief executive sat at last week’s state dinner for Xi, took the contracts.
Amazon and Google marked their stakes down in the same quarter. Your statement showed a bad month for two stocks you never thought of as AI bets.
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$380 billion
What investors valued Anthropic at in February, the month the Pentagon fight began.
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$965 billion
The valuation in May, after a $65 billion raise.
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$2 trillion
Roughly where the reported talk around its stock listing now sits.
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How it ends
You get a truce before Anthropic lists, unless the Pentagon keeps its label on after winning in court.
We ran it both ways, and the dinner is the tell. Ten at night, two days after a court win. A President in that position does not invite the losing side over for a photograph.
Trump said what he wants before the dinner. “We’re about a year, maybe a year and a half up on China,” he told reporters. Anthropic is one of the labs that lead is built on.
Anthropic needs something too. A clean listing. It filed its paperwork to go public in private in June. A company at war with the Defense Department has to disclose that war to every buyer.
The money behind it pushes the same way. Amazon booked $16.8 billion of pre-tax gains on its Anthropic stake. In one quarter.
The price of a truce is probably one of Anthropic’s red lines, softened into contract language. The dissent in Friday’s ruling gives both sides a way down. Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote that “a contractor’s honest and upfront enforcement of restrictions” is not that kind of risk.
The court handed the Pentagon the upper hand.
The President spent Sunday night showing he wants the company on his side anyway.
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Tuesday’s White House meeting with AI executives, with Speaker Mike Johnson in the room, is the first test. The thing to watch is simpler: whether the Pentagon drops or suspends its supply-chain-risk label on Anthropic. Until it does, Friday’s ruling stands.
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Also on the table
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Futures put the odds of another Fed hike in October above 70 percent.
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Brent crude traded near $107 on Monday after US-Iran talks stalled.
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Gold slipped to its lowest level since August 5 on Monday.
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