Throughout this debacle, Anthropic does not believe it has violated any substantive procedures or rules set by the Trump administration, according to a person close to the company. But the White House argues that Anthropic behaved negligently, showing it cannot be trusted to safely implement frontier technology.
This saga proved to me that we are now officially in the Wild West era of US AI regulation. Although there are some laws on the books governing frontier AI development, that doesn’t mean companies won’t get into trouble with Trump’s White House when they cross unspoken boundaries.
“The problem here is that the White House is in an extremely anti-regulatory posture, and now they’re faced with real AI capabilities that people have been predicting for years,” said a former White House technology official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing his professional relationships. “There should have been preparations and policies in place to deal with this systematically, managing the benefits and risks, but instead it’s just a slap-in-the-blank approach that puts the AI industry in real trouble.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly blocked efforts to impose guardrails on the AI industry, often arguing that regulations could hinder American innovation and set the country behind rivals such as China. Since returning to the White House, President Trump has signed executive orders that reversed a Biden-era effort to create a national AI framework and created a federal task force to challenge state laws that could be deemed onerous.
While WIRED and other publications made public details of the conversation between Anthropic and the White House last week, the controversy is still defined by its opaqueness. At no point has the US government explicitly stated what Anthropic did wrong – the best post we have on X outlines the general position from White House technology adviser David Sachs.
The irony is that the White House’s actions have likely hindered the type of innovation it seeks to protect. The Trump administration demanded that Anthropic block all foreign nationals from accessing Mythos and Fable 5, preventing many of the AI Lab’s employees from accessing its most cutting-edge models, which the company says has accelerated its research and development in recent months. All of Anthropic’s customers are also closed, including Apple, Meta and most of the Fortune 500 customers.
The White House may have legitimate reasons to be concerned about Anthropic’s models. As my colleagues and I reported on Wednesday, U.S. officials became concerned when they learned earlier this month that Anthropic shared Mythos with South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom, which they allege has ties to China. Separately, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns to U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant that some guardrails could be circumvented on Cloud Fable 5, a secure version of Mythos.
Even if these concerns are legitimate, it does not mean that the White House has handled them adequately. In the first case, Anthropic says it has coordinated with the US government on the rollout of Mythos, which suggests there may have been an opportunity for authorities to sound the alarm about SK Telecom prematurely. Anthropic has also been working with the Korean company for years, and because of this arrangement it has never faced national security problems before. And when the White House raised concerns about SK Telecom to Anthropic, it immediately revoked access to the model, as we reported.
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