The Trump administration has made up its mind about who it will and will not deal with at Anthropic, and the company's chief executive, Dario Amodei, has landed on the wrong side of that line.
According to people directly familiar with the negotiations, officials found Amodei too difficult to engage with and felt he did not listen to their concerns. The shift in tone is striking. "Tom Brown is not being a weirdo like Dario and can actually engage," one person familiar with the calls said. Brown, an Anthropic co-founder, has, along with the company's public policy chief Sarah Heck, taken over the outreach to Washington.
The export controls that took the models offline
The backdrop is a hard line the government has not yet softened. On June 12, export controls pulled Anthropic's most powerful models offline after the National Security Agency affirmed that there were ways to switch off the guardrails and reach the more powerful capabilities buried inside the company's restricted Mythos model. Those controls remain in place.
Even so, the two sides have spoken repeatedly over recent days. The administration has been encouraged that Brown and Heck, rather than Amodei, are leading the conversation. The talks have run on two tracks at once, one at the senior level and another at the working-group level, with technical staff from both sides in the room.
What Anthropic must prove
A large part of the discussion has centred on a single question: what level of proof from Anthropic would be enough to ease the government's worries about jailbreaks of Fable 5. Settling that is harder than it sounds, and part of the difficulty is conceptual. Independent cybersecurity experts have increasingly argued that guardrails on AI models are only a stopgap, because skilled users, and future AI models, will eventually find ways around any constraint.
The White House declined to comment. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.
When Anthropic will be allowed to redeploy Fable 5 is still unclear. What is becoming clearer, possibly within days, is exactly what the company will have to do to get the export controls lifted.
Lawmakers want answers by June 26
Congress has now stepped in. Last week a bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a list of questions about the way forward to Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who has taken a leading role on the jailbreak issue partly because the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security runs export controls.
One question went straight to redeployment: "What specific criteria does the Department rely upon for determining whether to restore public access to the model through a revision of this decision? What is the timeline for that decision?"
The letter, signed by representatives Sam Liccardo, Jay Obernolte, C. Scott Franklin and Ted Lieu, demanded answers by June 26. A Commerce Department spokesperson declined to say whether the agency would meet the deadline.
Meanwhile, the president is fixated on a reflecting pool
Away from the AI fight, President Donald Trump has been posting furiously on Truth Social about negative coverage of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. After his $16.4 million renovation, the pool has been plagued by algae blooms and flaps of blue sealant that appear to have peeled away from its floor.
Trump claimed several people were arrested for alleged vandalism to the renovations, but an administration official would not clarify which activities around the pool would count as a crime. On Tuesday, crews also began putting up fencing around the water.
Since last week, the National Guard stationed at the pool have been told to detain anyone even touching the water, never mind peeling at the sealant, so that US Park Police can arrest them on vandalism-related charges, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The rule being cited is 36 Code of Federal Regulations, Chapter 1, Section 2.1(a)(6), an administration official said, which bars "possessing, destroying, injuring, defacing, removing, digging, or disturbing a structure or its furnishing or fixtures, or other cultural or archeological resources." A second rule, 36 CFR 7.96, prohibits "bathing, swimming or wading in any fountain or pool" except the Rainbow Pool at the World War II memorial and the German-American Friendship Garden fountains, both next to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
Whether simply dipping a hand in the water breaks either rule is not clear, and it is probably not worth a misdemeanour citation to find out.
