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Late last year, relations between the United States government and Anthropic began to break down. Anthropic was one of a handful of companies that had recently won contracts with the Department of Defense; unlike its peers, however, the firm sought guarantees about how its tools would be used.\u00a0Domestic mass surveillance was off the table, it said, as were fully autonomous weapons. The DoD balked, Anthropic insisted, and at some point, everyone involved in these negotiations made it clear that they found the people across the table to be stupid and\/or annoying. By February, the situation came to a head, publicly pitting logorrheic Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei against peacocking Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth \u2014\u00a0a match made in negotiation hell<\/a> \u2014 and the government began the process of declaring Anthropic a supply-chain risk, an unprecedented and punitive move typically reserved for companies tied to hostile foreign governments. So far, so bad for the nascent project of American AI regulation.<\/p>\n The supply-chain designation went to court, where it remains<\/a> unresolved; in the meantime, Anthropic announced a new family of models, which the company called a \u201cstep change\u201d in cybersecurity capabilities. The company reached out to a range of peer firms and government officials to offer early access to cyber \u201cdefenders.\u201d In the process, relations with the administration, at least some members of which appeared to be taking AI cybersecurity risks seriously, seemed to thaw. In June, Anthropic released Fable, a version of its Mythos-grade model with cybersecurity limitations built in. It was quickly metabolized like other recent AI releases: by reviewers identifying<\/a> its strengths and weaknesses; by AI watchers adjusting their predictions about where the technology could be going; and by numerous customers, including anyone paying for its $20-per-month usage plan, who shared their experiences online.<\/p>\n Within a few days of Fable\u2019s release, though, Anthropic withdrew access to Mythos and Fable. The company told its customers it was as surprised as they were:<\/p>\n The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.<\/p>\n Behind the scenes, according to the most recent<\/a> reporting, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent after engineers at his companies found a \u201cjailbreak,\u201d or a way to circumvent protections put in place by Anthropic to prevent misuse. Anthropic suggested that the jailbreak was neither significant nor unique to Claude and that the same results could be produced with ChatGPT; the administration, now leaking to the press, accused the company of failing to \u201chonor\u201d a recent, and vague, executive order about AI, which outlined a voluntary review program for new AI models and accused the company of being a \u201cbad actor.\u201d Hegseth couldn\u2019t help himself:<\/p>\n Three months ago, @DeptofWar<\/a> kicked @AnthropicAI<\/a> out of our building\u2014forever. <\/p>\n Every passing day proves why that was the right move. \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8<\/p>\n \u2014 Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) June 13, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n This is not true, for what it\u2019s worth. And a lot of other specifics about this situation are sort of weird at first glance. Why would Amazon, Anthropic\u2019s largest corporate investor and a major compute partner, want to trigger a fight like this? (Could it be related to the company\u2019s plans to become less dependent<\/a> on third-party providers for AI?) Why would an administration that\u2019s been reluctant to embrace AI \u201csafety\u201d as a concern suddenly wield it against the most safety-obsessed AI company?<\/p>\n According to Axios<\/a>, the situation can be explained by some of the same dynamics present since late last year, quoting a source who says that Anthropic \u201chas not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration and appreciate the ideological differences\u201d and that \u201cit\u2019s like they just speak in different languages.\u201d No doubt this matters: Even without the Trump administration\u2019s vindictive, personalist tendencies, and setting aside the genuine and widely felt uncertainty about what AI regulation should look like in 2026, Anthropic is probably a particularly strange counterparty. For starters, it is led by guy who has extremely specific ideas about how the looming threats of his company\u2019s products should be handled, not just by his firm but by regulators, accompanied by broadly liberal but deeply idiosyncratic politics informed by years of in-the-weeds discussions with AI researchers, rationalists, and effective altruists about AI alignment and x-risk. It\u2019s easy to imagine how meetings between Trump officials and superintelligence-pilled Anthropic employees could go wrong. Honestly, it\u2019s hard to imagine how they\u2019d go right.<\/p>\n The bigger issue, though, is that they shouldn\u2019t really need to. The administration\u2019s approach to the AI industry, since the beginning of Donald Trump\u2019s second term, has been fairly hands off, consistent with its generally skeptical stance on regulations of any kind, and led by a group of people with financial ties to the industry and a shared belief that American AI firms are in an arms race with China that must be won at all costs. This left a lot of space for AI firms to float the need for broad AI regulation themselves, either in earnest, as a way to garner goodwill as public opinion begins to turn against them, or as a way to get in front of backlash-driven regulations that they might find cumbersome. They\u2019ve floated everything from new taxes and UBI programs to, as Amodei recently suggested<\/a>, an FAA-like oversight structure, involving \u201ctechnical testing and auditing\u201d and in which models could be \u201cblocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2026, with high economic stakes, they \u2014\u00a0and the broader public \u2014 are getting something superficially similar to that but worse and enforced with little transparency or process, no predictability, and more than a bit of open spite: an informal, incoherent, and opaque oversight regime responsive only to the president, his hawkish foreign-policy team, and, maybe, occasionally, a tip called in by a business leader who may or may not have his own interests in mind. If you\u2019re Anthropic, you get scrutiny<\/a> for offering your product to a Korean firm with vaguely alleged ties to China. If you\u2019re Elon Musk, you get a different sort of meddling: On Monday, the Justice Department intervened on behalf of xAI, which recently signed a deal to provide compute to Anthropic, claiming<\/a> that a lawsuit alleging that the company\u2019s gas-turbine-powered data centers in Mississippi violate the Clean Air Act threatens \u201cAmerican national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War\u2019s military operations.\u201d (The administration\u2019s numerous previous attempts to govern by executive order haven\u2019t worked particularly well, but it\u2019s possible that the combination of the AI industry\u2019s relative newness and its self-implication in national security make it a perfect target for the intervention\u2013by\u2013Truth Social\u2013post governing style.)<\/p>\n The Trump administration\u2019s attitude toward the AI industry up until now has been, for the most part, to let it rip. Now, with IPOs on the horizon, and talk of trillion-dollar valuations, the administration is suddenly taking a keener interest in what these companies are doing, not to make sure they\u2019re operating responsibly, or in the broad national interest, or to ensure their products don\u2019t cause too much economic pain elsewhere in the economy, but rather to let the industry know, bluntly, who is really<\/a> in charge.<\/p>\n Sign Up for John Herrman column alerts<\/p>\n Get an email alert as soon as a new article publishes.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n