Exclusive | AI giant Anthropic faces possible clash with White House as backers include left-wing Ford Foundation: sources

AI giant Anthropic is facing a possible head-on collision with the Trump administration — as concerns from conservatives multiply that the fast-growing firm carries a left-wing bias, The Post has learned.Investors in the San Francisco-based company — known for its popular Claude chatbot — include the Ford Foundation, a notoriously left-leaning group that bought $5 million worth of Anthropic shares in March 2024 in the bankruptcy of disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto empire, according to little-noticed court filings.Earlier this month, Vice President JD Vance called out the Ford Foundation by name while vowing to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence” following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.That’s after Anthropic recently irritated Trump officials by barring federal contractors from using its tools for some law enforcement purposes.Some at the White House have grumbled that Anthropic, whose CEO Dario Amodei is a prominent Democratic donor, could be “selectively enforcing its policies” due to differing political views, Semafor reported.Taken together, the two data points are likely to invite unwelcome scrutiny for Anthropic — even as rivals including Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI have worked to curry favor with the White House, a source close to the Trump administration said.“When [the White House] is looking for a collaborative partner and suddenly they start being obstinate over White House objectives, and it comes to surface that they got a significant investment from a hostile political organization – which is what I would consider the Ford Foundation to be – I think you’re going to see a lot of eyebrows being raised,” the source added.Anthropic, whose backers include Amazon and Google, is competing with OpenAI, xAI and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta for everything from lucrative federal contracts to crafting potential federal regulations around AI.

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