Donald Trump’s blocking of Anthropic is capricious and chaotic

 

America’s closest allies are shellshocked

Jun 14th 2026|4 min read

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IN BANNING foreigners from using Mythos 5 and Fable 5, Anthropic’s most powerful models, America’s government may simply have been seeking to punish the firm by the readiest means available. But whatever its intentions, it has demonstrated the difficulty of curbing access to potent technology.

The ban has echoes of America’s decision to restrict public-key cryptography, a technology used to secure digital communications, from the 1970s to the 1990s. Back then the government argued that cryptography was akin to a munition; one developer was investigated by the FBI for violating the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Civil-liberties advocates eventually prevailed, securing the right to use, sell and export most encryption systems.

Encryption was a potent technology, but narrow in its application. AI is far more powerful and versatile. On June 11th Mark Warner, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that General Joshua Rudd, who leads the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, had told him that Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours”.

Advanced AI differs from encryption in another respect, too. Whereas cryptography eventually became widely available abroad, America today enjoys a clear lead in AI. China, hobbled by American chip controls, is probably about a year behind. That advantage could become unassailable if Anthropic or other American labs crack recursive self-improvement (RSI), whereby models write better versions of themselves and thereby accelerate progress. Many insiders think that is possible.

A better analogy, then, may be nuclear technology, a comparison that has inspired, fascinated and horrified AI researchers. During the second world war Britain shared its early nuclear-weapons research with America. But in 1946, with the war over and the bomb’s awesome power demonstrated in Japan, Congress passed the McMahon Act, ending co-operation with all foreign countries, including close allies. Co-operation resumed only much later, after Britain had already shown that it could develop its own bomb.

Render unto Caesar

America’s allies are reeling again. Many had spent months securing access to Mythos for government agencies, banks and other big firms. Those permissions evaporated overnight. The ban does not even exempt America’s partners in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance: Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. They are already grappling with the recent lapse of some surveillance powers Congress had failed to renew. Britain’s AI Security Institute, the world’s leading body for testing and jailbreaking new models, is also locked out.

Some foreign policymakers see the ban as a wake-up call. “After a lesson this clear every nation will be asking what they need to achieve sovereignty,” says Tom Tugendhat, a former British security minister. But middle powers are in a tight spot, writes Anton Leicht of the Carnegie Endowment, a think-tank. “Do you think a Trump administration that just refused to give you access to Fable is going to let you buy enough frontier chips to train an unrestricted Fable clone yourself?” Europe, especially, also lacks the processing power to pursue autonomy in AI.

Spy agencies are likely to regain access to Mythos, says a former British intelligence official; negotiations are under way. Some observers believe the American government will eventually have to relent for private firms, too. “Allies can perhaps take some comfort in the fact that this is a totally untenable approach to use long term, due to the number of foreigners inside American AI companies,” says Helen Toner of Georgetown University’s Centre for Security and Emerging Technology. “Preventing foreign nationals from accessing the models is essentially equivalent to preventing any company affected from doing any further AI R&D work.”

Anyway, restrictions on access often do not work. On the black market, hackers can buy American identities to gain access to AI models, as well as tools to jailbreak them, says Cynthia Kaiser, a former official in the FBI’s cyber division. Anthropic restricts use of its Claude model in China, yet some Chinese users still access it.

Mr Trump has pursued a bewildering approach to AI in recent months. He reversed most of the regulations put in place by the previous administration, which he has repeatedly mocked. He later permitted the sale of advanced AI chips to China. In April his hands-off approach to AI safety was called into question when Anthropic produced Mythos Preview, a model the firm judged such a threat to national security that it limited its release to a small group of approved customers. (Allies still have access to that.) On June 2nd Mr Trump issued an executive order calling for a voluntary framework whereby AI labs would give the government access to their latest models before release.

The sudden, capricious restrictions on Fable and Mythos are out of step with that approach and a far cry from the consistent, transparent oversight Mr Amodei advocates. In theory the Centre for AI Standards and Innovation, a government body that vets frontier models for dangerous capabilities, could serve as an independent arbiter in such disputes. But the administration recently instructed it to stop making its reports public (perhaps temporarily). As access to advanced AI becomes a matter of national security, America’s management of it is increasingly opaque. ■