Michael Dell on AI's Foundation, Anthropic Faces US Restrictions

Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell has shared his views on AI as Anthropic and the Trump administration remain at odds over restrictions on the company's advanced AI models. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Dell said, "AI is amazing but it's not 'magic,' it's just linear algebra, calculus, and statistics finally hitting the gym with enough data and compute." Dell’s comments come as the US government ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals, citing national security concerns. The directive forced Anthropic to disable the models for users worldwide as the AI company complies with the order.

Michael Dell says AI is powered by data, math and computing power

In the X post, Dell highlighted the technology behind modern AI systems. While AI products often appear human-like in conversations and tasks, Dell said the technology is fundamentally built on mathematics, statistics, large amounts of data and powerful computing infrastructure. The remarks come as governments around the world are paying closer attention to advanced AI systems and their potential impact on cybersecurity, national security and economic competition.

Anthropic challenges US decision

In a statement published after the Trump administration’s order to ban Mythos 5 and Fable 5, Anthropic said it disagrees with the government's decision, adding that the concerns appear to be linked to a "jailbreak" technique that allowed researchers to identify a small number of software vulnerabilities. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the jailbreak research was carried out by researchers at Amazon. Katie Moussouris, chief executive of cybersecurity firm Luta Security, said the researchers used a series of prompts to make Anthropic's model provide information about a handful of security vulnerabilities. Anthropic had reportedly shared a copy of the report with her, she said. The company has maintained that the vulnerabilities identified were already known and relatively minor. "We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities," Anthropic said in a statement. The company argued that similar results can be achieved using other publicly available AI models and said the vulnerabilities involved were minor and already known. Anthropic has complied with the directive but said it hopes access to the models can be restored. The company has also warned that applying similar standards across the industry could slow the release of future advanced AI systems.