Anthropic executives are expected to meet White House officials on Monday as President Donald Trump's moves against the AI firm continue to shock and confuse technology experts.
The Department of Commerce last week forced Anthropic to disable access to its latest AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for "any foreign national, whether inside the US or outside".
Anthropic, which had claimed that those models were finely tuned to reduce the potential risk of misuse that the company had warned about for several months, said the Commerce Department had cited a vague risk that the models could be compromised and fall into the wrong hands.
"We have not even received a disclosure of a concerning non-universal potential jailbreak that led to a harmful result," the company said.
In a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, at least 100 AI executives, cybersecurity experts and academics expressed concerns on Monday about the decision.
Anthropic complied with White House orders.
Anthropic employees in the US who are on work visas are not allowed to use the models. The decision came as a surprise to some, as the White House has largely dismissed worries about AI, particularly GPUs and CPUs being used by enemies of the US.
"This is not the way to embed US AI models in technology stacks around the world," said Mark MacCarthy, senior fellow at the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at Georgetown University in Washington. He added that the White House's demand that Anthropic block access to the models lowers incentives for other technology companies to innovate.
"Why would any company, foreign or domestic, rely on US AI models for any significant task when the US government can force or pressure the US company to withdraw it at any moment?" he said, highlighting previous US government attempts to crack down on big technology firms, such as the federal takedown of AT&T’s Bell System in the early 1980s.
That process, however, was at least transparent, whereas the White House's decision about Fable 5 and Mythos 5 has been shrouded in conjecture and mystery.
"Until some transparent, accountable process is wrapped around these export control decisions, US companies are at risk of being perceived as unreliable business partners around the world," Prof McCarthy said.
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, claimed the decision went against the pillars of AI governance.
"Transparency, fairness, clarity and evidence-driven enforcement should be core components of AI governance," wrote Kevin Frazier, a research fellow at the Cato Institute. "So long as AI policy decisions are driven by a few actors taking action behind closed doors in response to non-public reports, we will be far short of that standard."
Mr Frazier said that ultimately he agreed with Anthropic that the Trump administration's decision was not "grounded in technical facts" and that it had shaky legal support. "It should not be the case that the government needs to be reminded by private entities about the rule of law," he said.
This is not the first time that Anthropic, which recently filed for an initial public offering, has come up against the Trump administration. In February, Mr Trump demanded that all federal agencies stop using Anthropic's AI tools after the company refused to remove guardrails on its technology.
In a social media post at the time, Mr Trump called the AI company, which is led by chief executive Dario Amodei, a “radical left” and “woke” company.
Other technology companies, like Microsoft, and even conservative-leaning technology analysts, came out against Mr Trump and the Pentagon's demands about Anthropic. The matter is currently in litigation.
Last week's demands from the Commerce Department have fuelled speculation that the Trump White House has been punishing Anthropic under the guise of national security and cybersecurity concerns. Dean Ball, who helped to craft Mr Trump's AI Action Plan, called the White House's recent aggression towards Anthropic worrisome.
"This should alarm you regardless of what party you are in," he wrote in a post on X. "What you are seeing now will be used against you one day soon, if not by this admin then by its successors ... this is the antithesis of the rule of law."
Former White House crypto and AI adviser David Sacks disagreed with the notion that the Trump administration was unfairly punishing Anthropic. "Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior Department of War/Anthropic issues are wrong," he wrote on X.
Just a few hours before that post, however, he accused Anthropic of "running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy".
Yann Lecun, a prominent AI scientist and Meta's former AI lead, echoed that sentiment. "Dario Amodei's ridiculous fear-mongering about Mythos/Fable, and AI in general, finally pays off," he posted on Threads.
