Trump’s war on Anthropic threatens America’s dominance of AI

The Trump administration’s already confused approach towards regulation of artificial intelligence has become even less coherent. Its heavy-handed decision to impose export controls on Anthropic’s latest frontier AI models now threatens America’s dominance of AI development.

The US government’s actions, which forced Anthropic to immediately cut off global access to its Mythos and Fable 5 models, also create the impression that an administration which has made it clear it dislikes Anthropic because of its perceived “wokeness” is targeting the company for reasons other than the national security interests cited.

Last Friday, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Anthropic, informing the tech company that it now requires a license to export its AI models to all destinations worldwide and to all foreign persons, whether outside the US or within – effectively meaning that they couldn’t even be accessed by Anthropic employees who aren’t US citizens.

The directive, which gave Anthropic only 90 minutes to comply, came after Amazon’s Andy Jassy told the White House his researchers had identified a potential “jailbreak” (a way to circumvent the safety guardrails built into Anthropic’s models) in Fable 5 – which was supposed to be a safe version of the Mythos model that alarmed the world with its potential to exploit security flaws in most of the world’s software.

Anthropic has said it received explicit approval to release the model after the Commerce Department reviewed Fable 5 – and presumably either didn’t identify the jailbreak, or didn’t find it serious. The risk of a jailbreak has been overstated, and the administration has overreacted, it said.

The AI company, along with AI experts, also says that no model yet exists that doesn’t have potential jailbreaks, and that competitors like OpenAI and Google have vulnerabilities in their AI models that are similar to those that prompted the shutdown of global access to Fable 5.

The Trump administration has had an erratic approach to regulating AI.

One of the first actions Donald Trump took when regaining the White House – at the urging of the Silicon Valley billionaires that had helped fund his campaign – was to tear up the relatively light-handed regulatory framework the Biden administration had created for reviewing AI models before their release.

Last month, however, the administration announced an agreement with the leading AI developers to have new AI models evaluated 90 days before their release, only to backtrack and abandon that plan after pushback from some within the sector, and then subsequ