Three things to watch amid Anthropic’s latest feud with the government
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- Anthropic released a modified version of its Mythos coding model called Fable on Tuesday, June 9, and the US government placed export controls on it that Friday, prompting Anthropic to revoke access to both models within hours.
- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was the one who told government officials that Fable would be dangerous — a notable conflict given that Amazon is both an Anthropic investor and a builder of competing AI models.
- French politician Bruno Retailleau called the episode a 'wake-up call' for Europe to build its own AI, and shares in Chinese startup Zhipu have skyrocketed as companies look to unrestricted open-source Chinese models as an alternative.
- Leading cybersecurity experts wrote an open letter to the government arguing that access to Anthropic's models was helping researchers build defenses and that the models are no more dangerous than other widely available systems.
- US lawmakers are under rising pressure to act — after Anthropic's prior feud with the government over Pentagon use, a slate of bills was introduced to define limits on military AI, and polling shows most Americans want federal AI regulation.
- The White House has now called the most valuable AI startup a national security risk twice in a matter of months, reversing the deregulatory stance President Trump took when he took office and threw out the prior AI safety rulebook.
Why it matters: An export-control regime designed for uranium is now being applied to software, and the cybersecurity researchers who most need access to advanced models say that makes the US more vulnerable, not less. With French leaders citing the episode to push for European AI sovereignty and Chinese open-source models gaining traction as the unrestricted alternative, every drastic White House action on AI narrows the window for Congress to write coherent rules before the market decides for them.
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