Anthropic has hired Mariano-Florentino "Tino" Cuellar, a former California Supreme Court justice and current Harvard Corporation member, as its first global affairs chief. The move places a veteran of three presidential administrations at the helm of Anthropic's worldwide government relations at a moment of rising political friction for the company.
Cuellar will report to Anthropic President Daniela Amodei and oversee policy and government relations across all markets. He is taking a leave of absence from Stanford Law School, where he is a professor and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. He recently stepped down as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"Democracies must set the terms on which a technology this consequential shapes our lives and society, and Anthropic is intensely committed to that vision," Cuellar wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the role.
The appointment lands during a period of compounding regulatory pressure for Anthropic. The Pentagon earlier this year backlisted the company's technology over restrictions on military uses of Claude, a designation Anthropic 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 the same day as Cuellar's announcement, White House officials met with representatives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta to discuss an unpublished framework for regulating frontier AI models and testing their cybersecurity. No outcomes were shared publicly.
Cuellar brings deep government and governance credentials to the role. He served on President Joe Biden's Intelligence Advisory Board and co-chaired a working group on AI frontier models convened by California Governor Gavin Newsom. He joined Anthropic's Long Term Benefit Trust, the independent body that selects board members and oversees corporate governance, in January 2026, and will step down from the trust as he assumes the operational role.
His appointment also introduces an indirect channel between Harvard and the Trump administration. The university is currently defending against multiple federal investigations and a lawsuit seeking to claw back more than $2.7 billion in federal grants.
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