President Donald Trump has dialed back the rhetoric around Anthropic, saying in an Axios interview that he does not currently see the company as a national security threat. That is a noticeable shift after his administration moved to limit foreign access to the AI firm’s most advanced models, forcing Anthropic to pull them from general availability and turning a safety-first brand into a political punching bag.
The White House’s line is blunt: powerful AI should not be freely reachable by foreign nationals. Anthropic’s answer has been just as blunt, effectively narrowing access rather than fighting the order head-on. For a company that had recently filed for an IPO and was last valued at $90 billion, that is a messy place to be – especially when the government is drawing a bright red line around model access.
Why Anthropic is in the hot seat
Trump said Anthropic ”acted very responsibly” after the Commerce Department told the company it would need approval before giving foreign citizens access to the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. He also said Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei moved quickly to respond. The political subtext is obvious: Washington wants guardrails, but it also wants to avoid looking like it is kneecapping a US AI champion while China is still the bigger rival in the background.
That balancing act is not new. Across the AI sector, the same firms being praised for safety are increasingly the ones under the heaviest scrutiny, because safety language sounds great right up until regulators decide to use it as a checklist. Anthropic, which has built much of its identity around responsible AI, now has to prove that the branding was more than marketing varnish.
A wider clash with Washington
The Commerce Department move is the biggest US government intervention yet in an AI developer’s operations, at least in this case, and it lands on top of an already strained relationship with the Pentagon. In March, contract talks collapsed and the Defense Department said it would look elsewhere for AI suppliers, after raising concerns about Anthropic in the military supply chain. That is the sort of bureaucratic scolding that tends to linger far longer than a single news cycle.
- Anthropic must now get approval before foreign citizens can access Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
- The company has removed its advanced models from general access.
- Trump says he is not planning to shut the company down.
- The firm remains in conflict with the Pentagon over military use restrictions.
Trump’s softer line on Anthropic
For now, Trump’s message is less ”enemy” and more ”behave yourselves.” That gives Anthropic a little breathing room, but not much. The real question is whether the company can keep its models on the right side of both safety hawks and national-security hawks, two groups that rarely agree on anything except that someone else should be constrained first.