Anthropic Hires a Judge as Trump Fight Rages On
On August 4, 2026, Anthropic announced it had appointed Tino Cuéllar as the company’s first-ever Chief Global Affairs Officer, reporting directly to President Daniela Amodei, with responsibility for the company’s policy work, international engagement, and government relationships worldwide. The timing isn’t a coincidence — over the past six months, Anthropic had just been through a bruising legal fight with the US government.
Who he is
Cuéllar had just stepped down as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — a policy think tank with scholars in 20 countries — before taking this role. Before that, he served as a Justice of the California Supreme Court, ruling on major cases touching technology, privacy, and separation of powers. At Stanford, he holds a stack of titles: director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, director of the Stanford Cyber Initiative, the Cameron Schrier Family Professor at Stanford Law School, and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). On the government side, he’s served on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, and worked in the White House and federal agencies across three presidential administrations. He’s also co-chaired the bipartisan Task Force on Nuclear Proliferation and American Security, co-led California’s Frontier AI Working Group, chaired the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and sits on the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Responsible Computing Research.
He already had ties to Anthropic
This isn’t Cuéllar’s first connection to the company — he’s served as a trustee of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust since January 2026, stepping down from that role specifically to take the Chief Global Affairs Officer job.
How ugly the fight got
To understand why this role matters, you need the context of what Anthropic went through this year. On February 27, 2026, President Trump ordered federal agencies to “immediately cease” using Anthropic’s technology. On March 3, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went further and designated Anthropic a “national security supply chain risk,” after the company refused to loosen the guardrails it had placed around its AI being used for domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems. Anthropic sued the government in response, and a federal judge briefly blocked the ban — but a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. later denied Anthropic’s request to temporarily halt the blacklisting while the underlying lawsuit plays out. Things escalated again on June 12, when the US government called Anthropic and gave it just 90 minutes to comply with an export control order; Trump later publicly warned Anthropic to “get their act together” or face “major civil and criminal consequences.”
What the job entails, and what both sides are saying
Cuéllar’s mandate is defined as leading Anthropic’s policy work, strategic international engagement, and government relationships around the world. In his own words: “Policymakers are increasingly realizing that we are at a critical inflection point… Democracies must set the terms on which this technology advances, and there is no more consequential place to be shaping that work right now than Anthropic.” Daniela Amodei described him this way: “Tino has spent his career helping public institutions respond to times of change with thoughtfulness, pragmatism, and deep commitment to the common good.”
With a dispute that’s already reached a federal appeals court — and carries the threat of criminal consequences — still unresolved, Anthropic choosing a former state supreme court justice and senior policy scholar to lead its very first global affairs office may itself be the company’s first concrete answer to the question of how it plans to deal with governments going forward.
Anthropic isn’t the only frontier AI lab beefing up its policy operation at this particular moment, either — as regulatory scrutiny intensifies, more AI labs are handing the job of “dealing with governments” to senior figures who understand law, international politics, and tech policy all at once, rather than leaving it to a general PR or legal team. That Anthropic placed this role at a level reporting directly to its president says something about how high a priority this has become internally, while its relationship with the Trump administration remains unresolved.
