Harvard Corporation Member Tino Cuéllar Named Anthropic’s First Global Affairs Chief

Anthropic has tapped Harvard Corporation member Mariano-Florentino “Tino” Cuéllar ’93 as its first global affairs officer, placing the former judge and foreign policy leader at the helm of the artificial intelligence company’s worldwide government relations operation.

Cuéllar, a member of Harvard’s top governing body, will oversee policy and government relations as Anthropic — the company behind the Claude chatbot — navigates an increasingly fraught relationship with the Trump administration. He will report to Anthropic President Daniela Amodei.

Cuéllar will take a leave of absence from Stanford Law School, where he is a professor and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. He recently stepped down as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank.

“Democracies must set the terms on which a technology this consequential shapes our lives and society, and Anthropic is intensely committed to that vision,” Cuéllar wrote in a Tuesday LinkedIn post announcing the move.

“The choices we make today can help humanity avoid risks and pitfalls and, instead, harness extraordinary possibilities to advance science and improve lives across the world,” he added.

His appointment could also open another informal channel between Harvard’s leadership and the Trump administration as the University bats back a slew of federal investigations and litigation — including an ongoing lawsuit that seeks to claw back more than $2.7 billion in Harvard’s federal grant funding.

Harvard has previously relied on well-connected intermediaries to engage with the White House, including Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman, who emerged as a key go-between in negotiations between the University and administration last year.

Cuéllar joins Anthropic at a politically precarious moment for the company. A dispute over restrictions on military uses of Claude led the Pentagon to backlist Anthropic’s technology earlier this year, a designation that the company is challenging in court. The Trump administration later temporarily barred Anthropic from selling two of its most advanced models abroad, citing national security concerns.

On Tuesday, as Anthropic announced Cuéllar’s appointment, White House officials met with representatives from several prominent AI companies — including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta — to discuss an unpublished framework to regulate the firms’ newest models and test their cybersecurity protections. No results from the meeting were shared publicly.

Cuéllar has served on the Corporation since 2019. He joined Anthropic’s Long Term Benefit Trust — an independent body shaping the AI giant’s board and corporate governance — in January, but will step down from the trust upon joining the company.

A former California Supreme Court Justice, Cuéllar is well-established in AI governance and intelligence circles. He served on former U.S. President Joe Biden’s Intelligence Advisory Board and most recently co-chaired a working group on AI frontier models convened by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Cuéllar appeared last week on a new podcast hosted by Harvard College Dean David J. Deming, where the two discussed artificial intelligence and the role of institutions in responding to technological change.

Cuéllar said he thought it was “important to not be completely fatalistic” about AI policy and advocated for a regulatory approach that could evolve with the technology.

“There are plenty of ways you can really regulate in a clunky and a bad way,” Cuéllar said, suggesting it was helpful to look at and learn from prior responses to technological change.

“And how then to think about creating a framework that is going to be a little bit less static, because as you learn about a particular technology, you can make it more static or you can make it less so,” he added.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences moved to include Claude, Anthropic’s flagship product, as part of a suite of AI platforms available to affiliates in April, phasing out access to Open AI’s ChatGPT Edu, but did not share a timeline for rollout.

—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at hcc.35. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at elisespenner.82. Follow her on X @EliseSpenner.