Anthropic has become a target of the Trump regime with the enthusiastic assistance of rival OpenAI and even investor Amazon.
They’re also getting hit by lawsuits from angry customers for putting limits on their $200/month plan.
Amazon Enlists Trump Admin Against Anthropic
Check this out from the WSJ:
The Trump administration’s decision to halt all foreign use of Anthropic’s most-capable AI models was prompted by conversations between Amazon.com Chief Executive Andy Jassy and U.S. officials including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, people familiar with the matter said.
Researchers at Amazon had used a series of prompts to get Anthropic’s Fable 5 model to provide them with information that could be used to aid cyberattacks and was supposed to be off-limits, Jassy told the officials, according to people familiar with the matter. Tech industry executives have been in regular touch with the administration about the power of cutting-edge AI tools.
…
The officials decided that the most direct way to address that risk was by preventing foreign governments, companies and individuals from accessing the tool, the people said. President Trump later signed off on the action despite reservations about its hindering innovation, a senior White House official said.
The administration had long felt that Anthropic, one of the leaders in America’s artificial-intelligence race, couldn’t be trusted to manage the security risks its new model presented. Friday’s call between some administration officials and Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei reinforced that idea, the people said. Some of the officials said the company indicated that it was unwilling to work with security experts in the government to address the issue.
This follows Anthropic’s conflicts with Defense War Department Secretary Greasy Pete Hegseth, via The Hill:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took a shot at Anthropic on Saturday, after the artificial intelligence company discontinued access to two of its models to comply with a directive from the Trump administration.
“Three months ago, @DeptofWar kicked @AnthropicAI out of our building—forever. Every passing day proves why that was the right move,” Hegseth wrote on the social platform X.
Earlier this year, Hegseth labeled Anthropic as a supply chain risk and prohibited the use of its Claude AI chat bot within the Pentagon. Anthropic has sued the administration over the designation, which came after the firm’s CEO, Dario Amodei, sought to ensure that the government would not use the tool for fully autonomous lethal weapons or mass domestic surveillance of Americans.
Just Security had some insights on the implications of the Trump regime’s arbitrary moves on AI:
Given these events, observers at the intersection of AI policy and security matters may feel a sense of whiplash. That’s particularly so given this latest dispute comes on the heels of recent policy announcements by the Trump administration that many regarded as a change in tune from the aggressively laissez-faire rhetoric officials advanced a year ago.
Regardless, the immaturity of the federal government’s approach to AI is now on full display. It is likely to have significant and reverberating implications for ongoing debates – and efforts to address – issues at the intersection of AI governance, technological “sovereignty,” and the relationship between U.S. state and corporate power that are playing out in Washington and in capitals all over the world. It could be fairly argued that these ad hoc and wild swings on the part of the U.S. administration are no way to exercise state power, and is further evidence of the need for a regulatory system that provides a more stable equilibrium for stakeholders to operate.
On day four of his second term in office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled, “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.” It rescinded Biden era policy, including a 2023 executive order on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” which the Trump order characterized as an obstacle to “global leadership in artificial intelligence.” The order effectively reset the federal government’s AI policy process. In doing so, it discarded Biden-era tools that were designed to surface the types of risks the Trump administration is reacting to post-Mythos, including a scheme for the Department of Commerce to collect red-team results for dual use foundation models.
What followed were a series of actions and orders that, together, revealed a more complicated picture of the administration’s AI policy. As Alondra Nelson argued in Science earlier this year, it became clear that the administration’s approach involved “not the absence of AI regulation but its rearrangement,” operating through industrial policy, trade restrictions, immigration controls, and strategic preemption rather than only traditional regulatory processes. And yet it is often difficult to locate a coherent strategy within that rearrangement. The same administration that sought to strip away oversight in January 2025 is now, in June 2026, fumbling toward using ever more drastic levers of state power to exert control over the AI industry, and Anthropic in particular.
It’s pretty clear Trump 2.0 doesn’t much care for Anthropic’s CEO.
Trump Senior Staffers Mob Dario Amodei
Before we get too sympathetic to the plight of the beleaguered CEO let’s hear from the man himself:
CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei awkwardly smiles through his answer to a question about why Claude AI directly contributed to the US Military bombing of the elementary school in Minab. pic.twitter.com/HeTnmi46K2
— Victims of Capitalism Memorial Foundation (@karaokecomputer) June 12, 2026
The CEO of Anthropic isn’t the most sympathetic character in our tale but this seems a bit much, per Politico:
The Trump administration’s decision to impose sweeping export controls on Anthropic followed a frantic 24-hour effort by senior officials to convince the company to voluntarily pull a newly released artificial intelligence model that officials believed posed security risks, according to two administration officials and a senior White House official, who like others in this story were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the episode.
The move, which followed multiple tense calls between Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, underscores how the White House is wrestling in real-time with regulating fast-moving and potentially dangerous AI models.
…
By Friday morning, the issue had reached the highest levels of the White House.Bessent, Cairncross, chief of staff Susie Wiles and other senior officials met to discuss the model and the administration’s response, according to the administration official and the senior White House official. Bessent joined remotely while traveling to Houston for a previously scheduled public event, one of them said.
Following the meeting, the administration attempted to reach Amodei but was told he was unavailable because he was attending a wellness retreat, one of the administration officials and the senior White House official said.
A spokesperson for Anthropic rejected the claim that he was at a wellness retreat, saying, “this is absolutely false.”
A person close to Anthropic said Amodei was first requested around noon and was on the phone with senior officials within an hour and 15 minutes. While he was out of pocket, Anthropic offered other senior leaders in his place, the person said.
When the administration finally reached Amodei, he participated in three calls with a combination of roughly half a dozen senior administration officials, including Cairncross, Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to the senior White House official and one of the administration officials.
Other senior White House staff and administration officials including Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security Jeffrey Kessler, White House staff secretary Will Scharf, White House deputy chief of staff Richard Walters, and assistant to the president for policy Walker Barrett also participated in some of the calls, according to the senior White House official.
That’s a LOT of firepower to bully one executive.
Former Trump “AI and Crypto Czar” and Paypal mafia don David Sacks (who left Trump 2.0 in March) explained:
I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true:
— As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.…
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) June 13, 2026
Especially relevant:
A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused.
In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.”
In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety.
…
The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.
Gary Marcus commented:
let’s consider last night’s Commerce Department cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face export control order, which has basically led to the (temporary?) shutdown of Fable and Mythos, perhaps sparking a crisis in the US AI industry.
You can tell almost nobody outside some very small circle even considered the order before it was issued, because almost everyone I have read — right and left, pro-tech and not — has panned it. It was both bad policy and bad politics.
§
To be sure, Anthropic brought this on themselves to a considerable degree, by (a) overselling doom and their own wares and (b) by literally and repeatedly calling for export controls themselves. If you say “Ohhhh it’s so dangerous something something beat China something something 10% chance of destroying all civilization something” often enough, sooner or later people might indeed want to put limits around your product.
That said, no industry can thrive if the government appears arbitrary and capricious, as they did last night, (effectively) abruptly shutting down an entire thriving industry, and appearing very selective and reactive in the choices it made.
What we need now is something I have not seen of the Trump administration: carefully considered nuance. Shoot first and ask questions later is not what we need right now.
Instead, the government appears to have panicked when Amazon showed them that Anthropic’s Fable could be jail-broken. Which is naive, since essentially every LLM-based system can be jailbroken. This is not a new problem. Whatever you might think about Mythos or Fable or AI in general, what was just identified was not new and likely not specific to Mythos or Fable and in any case should not have been addressed in such a hasty, arbitrary way, with such little attention to downstream consequences.
Former BlackRock portfolio manager Edward Dowd commented:
It has come to light that the CEO of Amazon Andy Jassy was one of the tech leaders who tipped off the Administration to security risks. Amazon has an investment in Anthropic.
Stepping back a bit one sees the carefully cultivated circular financing AI ecosystem is under pressure. Earlier this week Sam Altman threatened price wars.
Have the economic realities of questionable ROI caused an every man for himself cascade? If so the unwind will be epic.
Did someone say OpenAI?
Coalition of States Sues OpenAI
First up, the big news is from the WSJ:
A coalition of state attorneys general has opened an investigation into OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter, the latest in a series of legal actions by states directed at artificial intelligence companies.
OpenAI was served Friday with a subpoena seeking documents related to a range of its activities and impact on users, including advertising, user engagement and retention, handling of consumer data and health data, activities related to minors and seniors, deep learning models, model sycophancy and company policies, some of the people said. The subpoena, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, was sent by New York’s attorney general.
…
The company confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission this month.
Earlier this month, Florida became the first state to file a lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman. The lawsuit claims OpenAI and Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI in April over the role its chatbot played in a mass shooting that killed two people at Florida State University last year. The suspect allegedly turned to ChatGPT as a confidant and sounding board to plan the attack, and the chatbot dispensed advice.
OpenAI Threatens Anthropic With Price Wars
The Wall St Journal has the skinny:
OpenAI is considering drastically lowering the prices it charges users as it seeks to win customers from its rival Anthropic.
The company is weighing significant cuts to what it charges for tokens, the unit of measurement artificial-intelligence firms use to bill for their products, according to people familiar with the matter. The move would be in anticipation of similar cuts the company expects at Anthropic, the people said.
Business executives have begun to balk at the high prices for AI usage. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said at a recent event that costs had become “a huge issue.”
“I think we’ll have a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend,” he said.
Drastic price cuts could potentially erode the profit margins of both companies, which already lose billions of dollars because of the enormous cost for computing resources needed for AI systems to process queries and carry out tasks.
OpenAI is trying to catch up with its younger rival in the race to win enterprise customers that are paying large amounts of money for AI tools that can improve workplace productivity.
Anthropic’s revenue recently surged after its coding tool Claude Code went viral among software engineers, and the five-year-old startup surpassed OpenAI’s valuation for the first time. OpenAI has since made its own coding tool Codex a focus of the company.
Interestingly, Altman is also proposing a pretty novel arrangement with Trump.
OpenAI’s team player attitude might be a product of the massive financial stress their brute force approach to mass scale LLM’s is causing:
Very important point: SoftBank was pledging *all* of its OpenAI stock (worth $60bn+ on paper) to get a $6 billion margin loan. Banks turned it down due to concerns about the value of OpenAI stock. Banks clearly do not think OpenAI is worth $852 billion.https://t.co/B9ilbd043M https://t.co/ZOukSi63Ov pic.twitter.com/mYY4xkFTGO
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) June 10, 2026
How About If the Government Takes a Cut?
Vox explains:
Last Friday, President Donald Trump announced that he would soon be meeting with the executives of top AI companies to discuss a financial “partnership.”
“There are concepts where pieces [of these companies] could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies,” Trump said. “And by doing that, they’re going to like it better.”
President Donald Trump says the government may take ownership stakes in major AI companies and share the returns with the public — an idea pitched to him by OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
Critics suspect OpenAI’s real aim is to insulate itself from regulation and competition by aligning its profits with the government’s interests.A broad, well-governed public wealth fund could genuinely help counter AI-driven inequality.
But an informal deal between the White House and a few favored firms is more likely to breed cronyism than spread wealth.
By this, the president (seemingly) meant that the US government may take an ownership stake in major AI companies and then distribute the fruits of its investments to the general public, perhaps through universal dividend payments.This proposal did not come to Trump via some undercover, socialist operative embedded deep within the White House — but rather, from the CEO of OpenAI.
Critics suspect OpenAI’s real aim is to insulate itself from regulation and competition by aligning its profits with the government’s interests.
As NOTUS reported last week, Altman first pitched Trump on the concept in early 2025 and discussions between the administration and OpenAI have heated up more recently. No deal has been finalized. But talks have centered on an arrangement in which top AI labs voluntarily donate shares to the government — an approach that might enable Uncle Sam to partially nationalize the AI industry without Congress passing any law.
The NOTUS report points to another possible reason for tensions between Trump Inc and Anthropic:
While planning is ongoing and details are in flux, discussions have centered on having the firms voluntarily cede the shares to the government, the people said. The returns on the investment could then be directed to public purposes, one of the people said, such as distributing a dividend payment to all American households.
The deliberations, which have not been previously reported, come as OpenAI and Anthropic prepare for what are expected to be among the largest initial public offerings in history — and as they struggle with public concern over AI. A person familiar with the matter said Anthropic is not having conversations with the administration about providing equity to the government.
They also report on bipartisan support for “the public” taking big chunks of these companies:
In private, Trump has said that American taxpayers should benefit from artificial intelligence, said one of the people familiar with the matter.
This instinct is bipartisan: Sen. Bernie Sanders called this week for the U.S. government to acquire 50 percent equity stakes in the AI companies, effectively bringing the companies under federal control. The Vermont independent’s forthcoming bill also would tax at 50% the stock of OpenAI, Athropic, xAI and other AI firms, with the proceeds being placed in a sovereign wealth fund for the public.
Tech companies are strongly opposed to this measure, but many are eager to find ways to win over Americans who are skeptical of AI. Fifty-five percent of Americans think AI will do more harm than good in their day-to-day lives, according to recent Quinnipiac polling. The upsurge of public anger has posed a threat to AI’s development, particularly through local resistance to the construction of data centers crucial to its technological advancement.
…
Steve Bannon, a tech critic and the president’s former chief strategist, said the talks between OpenAI and administration officials were evidence that AI companies are fearful of public scrutiny and regulation. Like Sanders, Bannon argued that the government should take as much as 50% of the companies’ equity.“You can smell the stench of desperation emanating from the oligarchs as they run heedlessly to a public market takeout,” Bannon said. “We should not take ‘tip money’ but force them to cough up 50% of the equity — to be dispersed to American citizens.”
Great, just what “the public” needs, more financial exposure to AI:
Wall Street just pulled off the exact move that turned 2008 from a housing problem into a global collapse.
They turned Nvidia graphics cards into bonds, stamped them investment grade, and started selling them into the funds that hold retirement money.
Here is what happened… pic.twitter.com/DVZMAPLqqZ
— Ricardo (@Ric_RTP) June 14, 2026
Related Posts:
By
