The engineer who became Anthropic's secret weapon in its White House battle

Anthropic cofounder Tom Brown.

When Anthropic found itself in a high-stakes standoff with the White House over its newest AI models, it wasn't CEO Dario Amodei who smoothed the tensions. Instead, one of the company's quietest cofounders stepped in.Tom Brown, Anthropic's chief compute officer, helped negotiate a deal that persuaded the Commerce Department to lift export restrictions on the company's newest flagship models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The episode thrust one of AI's least visible leaders into the spotlight — and revealed how the engineer responsible for securing Anthropic's computing power has become one of its most important diplomats as well.It proved to be a win for the under-the-radar cofounder. Brown hasn't received the same media spotlight as his peers, but in finding the chips to power the company's AI technology, he leads an indispensable part of its grandiose ambitions. These recent White House negotiations show that his value extends to the political arena, where he's served well by his knack for relationships and straightforwardness.Michael Waxman, who cofounded a dating startup with Brown in the 2010s, told Business Insider that he's generally been very optimistic about AI, but added, "Knowing Tom's character and that he's in the room at the leading edge of some of these really important decisions definitely makes me just feel better and sleep easier at night."Anthropic's Head of Public Policy Sarah Heck worked alongside Brown on the White House talks, but Lutnik addressed his Tuesday letter about the export controls directly to Brown, Wired reported. Here are some key things to know about the 39-year-old cofounder's background.Brown bounced around Silicon Valley's startup world before teaching himself AI researchOut of college at MIT, Brown jumped into the Silicon Valley scene. He worked as an early employee at the language-teaching startup Lingt, went briefly back to school, then worked at the mobile advertising startup MoPub. He then cofounded Grouper, a startup that matched pairs of trios for in-person meetups, with Waxman as part of the accelerator Y Combinator's winter 2012 batch.Waxman said in those days, Brown had all the "table stakes" of a leader — "good human, kind, high integrity, always truthful, direct" — and that he also managed to build bridges across discipline divides within the company.