Inside the whirlwind 24 hours that led the White House to slap export controls on Anthropic - POLITICO
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Exclusive Inside the whirlwind 24 hours that led the White House to slap export controls on Anthropic<br>A series of tense calls between Anthropic’s CEO and administration officials on Friday underscore how the White House is wrestling with advanced AI models.
CEO and co-founder of Anthropic Dario Amodei speaks onstage during the 2025 New York Times Dealbook Summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, on Dec. 3, 2025. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
By Sophia Cai and Cheyenne Haslett06/13/2026 07:32 PM EDT
The Trump administration’s decision to impose sweeping export controls on Anthropic followed a frantic 24-hour effort by senior officials to convince the company to voluntarily pull a newly released artificial intelligence model that officials believed posed security risks, according to two administration officials and a senior White House official, who like others in this story were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the episode.<br>The move, which followed multiple tense calls between Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, underscores how the White House is wrestling in real-time with regulating fast-moving and potentially dangerous AI models.
The details of the calls have not been previously reported.
The administration’s imposition of export controls forced Anthropic to pull its new AI model, Fable, just days after it was released to the public. Anthropic had given assurances that it was safe but soon after its release, top administration officials developed fresh doubts that the AI’s guardrails were as secure as the company had suggested.<br>On Thursday, two days after the model’s public release, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns to the White House about the ability to bypass the model’s guardrails, according to the two administration officials and the senior White House official.<br>(Amazon, which is an investor in Anthropic, was responding to an administration request for feedback, said a person familiar with Amazon’s discussions.)<br>By Friday morning, the issue had reached the highest levels of the White House.<br>Bessent, Cairncross, chief of staff Susie Wiles and other senior officials met to discuss the model and the administration’s response, according to the administration official and the senior White House official. Bessent joined remotely while traveling to Houston for a previously scheduled public event, one of them said.<br>Following the meeting, the administration attempted to reach Amodei but was told he was unavailable because he was attending a wellness retreat, one of the administration officials and the senior White House official said.<br>A spokesperson for Anthropic rejected the claim that he was at a wellness retreat, saying, “this is absolutely false.”<br>A person close to Anthropic said Amodei was first requested around noon and was on the phone with senior officials within an hour and 15 minutes. While he was out of pocket, Anthropic offered other senior leaders in his place, the person said.<br>When the administration finally reached Amodei, he participated in three calls with a combination of roughly half a dozen senior administration officials, including Cairncross, Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to the senior White House official and one of the administration officials.<br>Other senior White House staff and administration officials including Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security Jeffrey Kessler, White House staff secretary Will Scharf, White House deputy chief of staff Richard Walters, and assistant to the president for policy Walker Barrett also participated in some of the calls, according to the senior White House official.<br>During the calls, Amodei tried to clear up what he assumed was a misunderstanding. He pushed back on the administration’s concerns, defended the guardrails and argued that the type of bypass that occurred, which he believed to be specific, did not pose the same risk as a broader “jailbreak” that would allow it to be used without any of the guardrails put in place by Anthropic.<br>In a blog post after the export controls were put in place, Anthropic said that “no testers have yet been able to find a universal jailbreak — a jailbreak method that can very broadly bypass the model’s safeguards, unblocking a wide range of cyber capabilities,” and that total avoidance of any jailbreaks isn’t currently possible for them or any other companies. They defended their systems, which they said “are so strong that many users have complained that they are overly broad.”<br>Cairncross and Bessent were unmoved by Amodei’s arguments. A White House official said Amazon’s findings were run past the National Security Agency and they felt they had “proof.”<br>They urged Anthropic to voluntarily...