Anthropic National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council

Anthropic announced the council on August 27, 2025, as "a group of leading bipartisan national security and public policy practitioners who will help Anthropic support the U.S. government and closely allied democracies in building and maintaining enduring technological advantages in an era of strategic competition," with the task of identifying "high-impact applications" in areas "ranging from cybersecurity to intelligence analysis to scientific research." Its inaugural members were:¹

• Roy Blunt, former senator from Missouri and member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, director of Tenet Healthcare and of the cyber company Nightwing, and former chairman of the advisory board of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
• David S. Cohen, former deputy director of the CIA and under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence.
• Richard Fontaine, chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, executive director of the Trilateral Commission, former foreign-policy adviser to Senator John McCain, and a member of Anthropic's own Long-Term Benefit Trust.
• Christopher Fonzone, former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under Biden.
• Lisa E. Gordon-Hagerty, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration in Trump's first term.
• Josh Hodges, former national security adviser to Speaker Mike Johnson and senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council, then an executive at VEON Ltd.
• Jill M. Hruby, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration under Biden and former director of Sandia National Laboratories.
• Mike Kuiken, former national security adviser to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and an adviser to the Special Competitive Studies Project.
• Dave Luber, former director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency and executive director of U.S. Cyber Command.
• Patrick Shanahan, former acting Secretary of Defense, chief executive of Spirit AeroSystems and director of Leidos.
• Jon Tester, former senator from Montana and chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, "where he oversaw $800 billion in defense and intelligence spending."

Six months later Anthropic refused the Pentagon's demand to drop its exclusions for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, and was designated a supply-chain risk.²