White House AI Export Control Decision Sparks Confusion and Political Infighting

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Back when I was covering Donald Trump’s first presidency, it was incredibly common to read three different versions of the same story. His administration had split into several factions, all of which had different interests, and all of which hated each other. There was the Reince Priebus traditional GOP faction, the Manhattan society-based Jared Kushner faction, the proto-populist Steve Bannon faction, the deep state John Kelly faction, the conspiracy-MAGA Mike Lindell faction, and so forth. Over time, you could get a sense of which camp was leaking which narratives to the media, either to undermine their rivals or to save their own reputations. In fact, for several decades, media manipulation was a common survival tactic in Trumpworld, which often ran on factionalism and fierce competition for Trump’s approval. As The Associated Press reported on November 26th, 2016, in an article about his pre-presidency business management style, “Aides also often float suggestions to him through the media, knowing that Trump is a voracious watcher of cable TV and might be persuaded by what he sees and hears.”

This tendency toward back-biting and cross-purposes once again gives us a little insight into the White House, this time explaining some of the omnishambles around the Trump admin’s Friday night decision to impose licensing restrictions on Anthropic’s advanced Fable model. Even after several days of statements, reports, and negotiations, it’s still unclear what actually happened behind the scenes, and it’s even less clear who’s responsible for what could have been a massive cybersecurity disaster.

To summarize for the uninitiated: On Friday evening, the White House placed an export control restriction on Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and Fable 5, its most recently released models, preventing foreign governments and nationals from using those two products. It essentially forced Anthropic to completely shut off access to both of those models, throwing their user base into chaos, the company’s future into doubt, and the overall prospects of frontier AI into a gray zone. Could the government simply just tell AI companies to stop operating? Over the weekend, several conflicting narratives emerged, though a few points remained consistent: The White House’s allies claim that within days of launch, several tech executives, including Amazon president and CEO Andy Jassy, reached out with concerns that Fable and Mythos could be jailbroken, posing an imminent threat to national cybersecurity. The two sides spoke on Friday, though the nature and duration of their calls vary, depending on the account: The Washington Post’s account claimed that Anthropic was given 90 minutes to take down its models, while a White House official told Politico that they had begged Anthropic “for hours.”

And from there, the details become even foggier, at least from the POV of the White House. One party tells The New York Times that Amazon had found a way to “jailbreak” the safety guardrails preventing users from using Fable for cyberattacks. A second party countered to the Times that one could achieve the same results with OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.5. Semafor reported that it may have been due to a China-linked group accessing Mythos, though no actual jailbreak had been confirmed. And Axios’ sources indicated the admin simply did not like Anthropic’s woke vibe. “Anthropic has not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration and appreciate the ideological differences,” one source familiar with the administration’s thinking told Axios. “It’s like they just speak in different languages.”

The Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field has a more thorough report here on the view from Anthropic’s world and the AI safety community, which argues that the fears around the jailbreaks are overblown. But inside Washington, the overwhelming consensus I’m hearing is that even if they’re ultimately right, Anthropic and Dario Amodei have created their own political nightmare by opposing the Trump administration — and not in a morally superior #resistance way. “They don’t bend the knee and Dario is stubborn and says what he thinks even when it’s dumb and they have a (justified or not) holier than thou vibe,” one AI policy advocate noted to me.

One of the most interesting themes emerging in Regulator’s run is how often the hard logic and irrefutable facts inherent to science and technology run headlong into the vibes-based venality of politics. And in the absence of any federal regulatory law, AI regulation is fully reliant on the vibes of whatever statement someone’s convinced Donald Trump to post on Truth Social or executive order he’s been talked into signing. Unfortunately, as former White House AI adviser Dean Ball pointed out on his Substack on Tuesday, this is the reality that frontier AI companies must operate under. As he writes in a blistering post:

What the law says does not matter. What Administration officials argue on one day does not matter. Anthropic is a political enemy of this Administration, in part because they have explicitly chosen to make themselves one. It is simply naïve to think that your company can operate under such circumstances without an extreme degree of regulatory caution. And given this context, Anthropic’s actions are viewed by many within Washington as not simply unwise, but actively antagonistic.

And it is not just about Anthropic and political grudge matches with the Trump Administration. Everyone at the frontier should understand that in practice, you do need an explicit green light from the government now.

That mantra certainly applies to all companies operating under the Trump administration, particularly to companies working on emerging technologies. But for some reason, while its competitors have quickly adapted, Anthropic’s vibes have been more visibly out of sync with those of the administration — and, tellingly, there are no factions in the administration rushing to defend Anthropic. Which has got to raise some sort of question.

And now, Recess.

Shot: Two weeks ago, before the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs face off in the NBA finals, Sesame Street’s Elmo betrays his hometown.

Chaser: The Knicks win in five, but the fan base hasn’t forgotten.

See you next week.