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, potentially dangerous AI models.
The details of the calls have not been previously reported.
The administration’s imposition of export controls forced Anthropic to pull its new AI model, Fable, just days after it was released to the public. Anthropic had given assurances that it was safe, but soon after its release, top administration officials developed fresh doubts that the AI’s guardrails were as secure as the company had suggested.
On Thursday, two days after the model’s public release, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns to the White House about the ability to bypass the model’s guardrails, according to the two administration officials and the senior White House official.
(Amazon, which is an investor in Anthropic, was responding to an administration request for feedback, said a person familiar with Amazon’s discussions.)
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 Undersecretary 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.
During the calls, Amodei tried to clear up what he assumed was a misunderstanding. He pushed back on the administration’s concerns, defended the guardrails, and argued that the type of bypass that occurred, which he believed to be specific, did not pose the same risk as a broader “jailbreak” that would allow it to be used without any of the guardrails put in place by Anthropic.
In a blog post after the export controls were put in place, Anthropic said that “no testers have yet been able to find a universal jailbreak — a jailbreak method that can very broadly bypass the model’s safeguards, unblocking a wide range of cyber capabilities,” and that total avoidance of any jailbreaks isn’t now possible for them or any other companies. They defended their systems, which they said “are so strong that many users have complained that they are overly broad.”
Cairncross and Bessent were unmoved by Amodei’s arguments. A White House official said Amazon’s findings were run past the National Security Agency, and they felt they had “proof.”
They urged Anthropic to voluntarily remove the model and coordinate with the government to address the vulnerabilities, according to the senior White House official and the two administration officials. Amodei asked for more time and information, but he made no commitments to pull the model, and at one point, Bessent told Amodei directly that he was making a “bad decision,” according to the senior White House official.
Shortly after the call, the Trump administration imposed its export control on the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, citing national security authority and banning their use by foreign nationals, according to Anthropic. The company said the “net effect” of the order was to “abruptly disable” the models for all customers “to ensure compliance.”
“Export controls were a last resort after begging them for hours to work with us,” the senior White House official said. “This was not something we wanted to do, but our hands were tied.”
After publication, one of the people close to Anthropic disputed that the company was given a choice to voluntarily work with the administration.
“The White House gave 90 minutes to take the models down, with no details on the actual threat,” the person said. “There was never any begging — or asking — for them to work with us, just a declared 90 minute deadline.”
White House officials — who had heard Amodei liken the dangers of Anthropic’s technology to a nuclear bomb — were baffled when the CEO said he was unwilling to take the system down to address a known security vulnerability, the senior White House official said. Anthropic has defined itself among the industry as a vocal advocate for AI regulation to counter massive global security risks and job disruption as AI quickly advances.
Three people familiar with the government’s thinking said Amazon wasn’t the only company to raise concerns.
“The crux of the issue was the lack of seriousness that Anthropic was applying to it,” said one of the three people. “Had Anthropic taken it seriously and, rather than dismissing it as isolated, moved to fix or pause access, this would have never happened.”
A second person close to Anthropic refuted the idea that the “jailbreak” was a breakdown of Fable 5’s safety systems and pointed to the company’s collaboration with the administration before it released Fable. The government didn’t object to Fable’s release in multiple conversations, the person said.
In its blog post after the administration enacted the export controls, Anthropic said it was complying with the government’s directive, but called it disproportionate.
“As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles,” Anthropic said.
A White House official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said innovation remains the White House’s “number one goal, but we also have to prioritize security as well.”
Amazon, in a statement, declined to share the details of its discussions with the administration. “It’s not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “When they occur, we don’t share the details of these discussions.”
Anthropic announced in early April that its latest powerful model, Mythos, would only be available to a limited set of tech and cyber firms, which could use it to test for vulnerabilities in their software. The company needed to limit the release because the model was so powerful, it said at the time, that it could wreak havoc in the wrong hands.
The model’s debut kicked off a series of meetings between Amodei and senior White House officials. Both sides described those meetings as productive. They led to a series of conversations about regulating advanced models that culminated in a recent executive order, which requested companies voluntarily submit their advanced models to the government before deploying them widely.
Fable 5, which launched publicly this week, was described by Anthropic as a “Mythos-class model” with safeguards to make it safe for general use. The model underwent reviews by the administration and the United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute.
But once the alleged security flaws were disclosed, multiple administration officials felt the model needed to be pulled.
In a post on X on Saturday morning, David Sacks, the former White House AI czar and a staunch opponent of regulation, agreed with the administration’s decision to pursue export controls for Anthropic.
Sacks said he did not believe the “jailbreak” was simple or not serious, nor did he believe the export controls were an attempt to exert control over the industry more broadly.
“The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release,” Sacks wrote. “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.”
Sacks and other officials in the administration have been critical of Anthropic, accusing it of leftist political bias and fearmongering because of its advocacy for stronger regulation of the industry and warnings about mass job disruption.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon elevated the administration’s disagreements with Anthropic to an unprecedented level earlier this year, designating the company a supply chain risk on March 3 over its refusal to allow its AI tools to be used for mass domestic surveillance and in autonomous weapons.
On Saturday, Sacks said the past feuds between the administration and Anthropic were separate from the export control decision.
“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,” Sacks wrote.
This story originally appeared on POLITICO and is courtesy of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces, and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet, and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms.
Brendan Bordelon contributed to this report.
