Trump vs. Anthropic: The AI wars are heating up – Computerworld
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by Steven Vaughan-Nichols
Trump vs. Anthropic: The AI wars are heating up
opinion
Jun 23, 20266 mins
The recent decision ordering the company to shut down its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models seems to be less about security than about obedience.
Credit: Shutterstock: Claudio Divizia ID: 519430672
The US government decision to force Anthropic to close down its latest and greatest AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, was only the next step in a burgeoning battle between AI providers and ignorant politicians.
Anthropic was on top of the world. Its Mythos 5 LLM had everyone excited. (If you believe the hype, it was kind of scary, too.) Even Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei admitted — or boasted? — that Mythos would bring an “enormous increase in the amount of vulnerabilities, in the amount of breaches” to us all. But with that fear came the promise of more AI power than ever.
Then, the roof caved in.
On June 12, the US Commerce Department used its export-control powers to demand that Anthropic cut off access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for all foreign nationals, citing national security concerns and fears of jailbreaks. After figuring out it had no way to do that, Anthropic pulled both of its newest frontier AI models offline worldwide.
Just what an AI company needs! All other Claude models, like the Opus and Sonnet series, remain online. But, come on, AI sales are all about the newest and most powerful models.
Adding insult to injury — and this is true at many high-tech companies — Anthropic has many employees who aren’t US citizens. This means Anthropic’s own programmers can’t work on their latest models.
Of course, this isn’t the first time US President Donald J. Trump and company have tried to put a spoke in Anthropic’s wheels. Back in February, Anthropic refused to give Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth the power to use its models to spy on American citizens and to power autonomous weapons.
This go-around, it wasn’t because Anthropic refused to kowtow to Trump’s officials. It was, they say, out of fear that these new models could be used to attack American interests.
Mind you, no one in Trump’s regime has the tech chops to know just how dangerous, or not, any AI model is. As I recently noted, Trump’s AI executive order has no teeth. Nor, more to the point, is there anyone in the administration with a clue about AI.
Specifically, at the Department of Commerce, neither Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick nor William Kimmitt, undersecretary of commerce for international trade, knows a thing about AI. Just what we need, more political hacks deciding tech policy.
So, how did they discover that Fable and Mythos were theoretically a danger to the US? Good question. According to The Wall Street Journal, it was Amazon CEO Andy Jassy who told the Trump administration that Fable was untrustworthy. Guess what? AWS offers its own full cloud AI stack, starting with Amazon Bedrock for foundation models, Amazon SageMaker for training and deployment, and a growing set of agentic AI tools and services.
In other words, Amazon is not a neutral party; it’s a competitor. Funny, that.
Sure, Amazon also has partnerships with Anthropic. But, in case you haven’t noticed, all the big AI companies are in bed with each other. That doesn’t stop them from fighting. What’s heating this up is that the AI companies are no longer offering flat-rate subscriptions and are replacing them with far more expensive, token-based pricing schemes.
Armed with this information, Commerce gave Anthropic 90 minutes to fix its “problem.” Right. AI development is fast, but it’s not that fast. In addition, according to Anthropic, officials haven’t spelled out exactly what’s wrong. They only know that Commerce claims there was a “narrow, non‑universal jailbreak” in Fable.
That’s it. That’s all.
Anthropic has also observed, with reason, that similar jailbreaks are possible on other leading models, like OpenAI’s GPT‑5.5. Those others, however, haven’t been hammered with comparable export controls.
The AI and security experts who do have an AI clue believe Commerce is behaving stupidly. (You won’t...