Some Democrats Hope Trump’s Anthropic Feud Will Help Them Win Over the AI Industry

Some congressional Democrats want to show artificial intelligence companies that they are a more reliable political partner than the Trump administration. They say President Donald Trump’s feud with AI giant Anthropic has presented them with an opportunity.

Last week, the Department of Defense banned the use of Anthropic’s AI tools after the company refused to give the administration unfettered access to its advanced AI software. The move sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, where Big Tech companies that have cozied up to the Trump administration saw one of their own cut out of potentially billions of dollars in revenue overnight.

“Some of the tech people very naively said, ‘We like Trump because he said no tech regulation,’” Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, said. “And then he turns around and says the opposite of light-touch regulation, ‘I’m just gonna take over your whole company.’ It’s crazy.”

Beyer said the administration’s actions are “absolutely” an opening for Democrats to make the case that Big Tech shouldn’t trust Republicans.

“I’ve had a couple of elections in a row where my Republican opponent shouts ‘socialism’ at me in every debate, and yet, you have Trump and Hegseth assailing one of the very foundations of our country, which is the right to private property,” Beyer said.

Some Democrats balked at the Pentagon’s Anthropic ban, calling it an “anti-business” move.

“When the administration does something like this, that it’s so radical and anti-business, it takes out any kind of predictability,’ Sen. Mark Kelly, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who has been involved in defense AI policy discussions, told NOTUS.

“Their systems are in a lot of other people’s systems that do business with DOD. This is a huge problem, and we’re gonna try to do something to address this,” Kelly said.

Kelly’s office told NOTUS that the senator is working to address this issue through the National Defense Authorization Act, but did not offer further details.

Rep. Sam Liccardo, who represents part of Silicon Valley, said he would introduce an amendment to the Defense Production Act to prevent the Pentagon from retaliating against technology companies over contractual disputes.

Liccardo argued that Democrats are better partners for the tech industry because they’re willing to defer to experts in technical debates.

“If the experts in AI are telling us that there need to be guardrails on the use of their tools, we should listen to them. And I don’t know anyone who wants to bet that the DOD knows better than the hyper-scalers about what their tools are capable of,” he told NOTUS about AI labs like Anthropic.

Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, reprimanded the Pentagon for politicizing AI adoption in the federal government, and Sen. Brian Schatz said he downloaded Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude.

It remains an open question whether the Trump administration’s moves against Anthropic will lead to a political realignment in Silicon Valley.

Steve Feldstein, a technology fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who served in the State Department during the second Obama administration, said it’s certainly possible.

“Even though the Trump administration is saying it wants low regulation, what it really wants is to dictate in very specific ways what companies do, and is willing to wield significantly powerful regulatory tools in order to get its way,” he told NOTUS.

“That’s not what the companies bargained for. That’s not the equivalent to no regulation, that’s equivalent to very personalist regulation,” Feldstein added.

There’s a lot of political capital tied up in the AI business, with an industry-backed super PAC boasting a $70 million war chest going into 2026. The PAC has not declared strict partisan allegiances, instead saying it will support candidates that support a national regulatory framework for AI — as opposed to state laws.

Trump has positioned himself as a champion for the AI industry, appointing venture capitalist David Sacks as lead adviser for AI policy in his administration. He has pursued a hands-off regulatory approach to AI, going as far as trying to block states from pursuing AI regulation.

Trump’s pro-industry approach has alienated some congressional Republicans and created backlash among Republican state legislators. But tech leaders have been happy, donating tens of millions of dollars to MAGA-friendly organizations.

The Trump administration’s decision to blacklist Anthropic was met with skepticism from some tech-friendly conservatives like Dean Ball, a former Trump adviser and lead author of Trump’s domestic AI platform, who equated this decision to “corporate murder,” in anessay.

Designating Anthropic, a California-based American AI company, as a national security risk is likely to face steep legal challenges, since this designation has traditionally been reserved for foreign companies suspected of espionage.

Before this clash, Anthropic was the only AI company whose software was allowed to access classified information for military operations. .

While the Pentagon is still using Anthropic’s AI for operations like the war with Iran, the department has reached a deal with OpenAI, Anthropic’s main competitor, to use their AI models in classified settings.

Anthropic’s AI coding tools have become increasingly popular in the tech sector. This designation could force major tech companies like Google, Amazon and Nvidia, all of which carry substantial contracts with Anthropic, to possibly drop tens of millions in contracts with the AI firm.