Inside the White House–Anthropic War

**Ian Krietzberg** (0:01)
What seems to be clear is that the government has changed its stance and is now interested in a form of regulation, but it's a very haphazard form. It's very much at the whims of whatever we're feeling, and that makes it really, really difficult.

**Peter Hamby** (0:19)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Puck's podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Thursday, June 18th. Today, I'm joined by Ian Krietzberg to walk me through the fraught relationship between Anthropic and the US government, which forced the company to yank two of its most powerful models over security concerns. Anthropic disputes the seriousness of the Trump administration's claims, but all of this comes as world leaders are gathered in France at the G7 Summit and expressing growing concerns about US dominance in the AI space and capricious American efforts to regulate the industry. As Ian explains, we are seemingly at a pivot point in which world leaders are going to have to put up or shut up when it comes to actually putting guardrails around the few powerful companies building our AI future. We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.
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Happy Thursday, everybody, and welcome to The Powers That Be. I'm joined today by my colleague, Ian Krietzberg, to talk to me about the second biggest story in the world. The first, of course, is Iran, but the second is Anthropic. And the debate over AI going down this week at the G7 Summit in Europe, the US government issued a warning to Anthropic after they released some powerful new models, basically saying that they could be jailbreak or hacked. That forced Anthropic to pull down these models. And it's the second instance of the Trump administration throwing punches at Anthropic. Of course, you remember the Defense Department came out and called Anthropic a supply chain risk. This all comes, of course, as Anthropic and their CEO, Dario Amodei, position themselves as the responsible AI company out there in the world. Ian's going to walk us through this, the political implications. But first, Ian, maybe my summary didn't do this story justice, tell our listeners what exactly happened with Mythos and Fable a few days ago.

**Ian Krietzberg** (4:15)
Yeah, well, this is going to be one of those things that will be unpacking what has happened probably for a long time.
This industry just loves throwing really dramatic events on Friday afternoons. Sam Altman was fired on a Friday afternoon and this happened on a Friday. And so this got kicked off when Anthropic puts out a statement at like 8 p.m. or something on Friday and they say, hey, we've had to take down Fable 5 and Mythos. It was a big deal that Anthropic had put these models out there in the first place. Because Mythos was this insanely hyped model, specifically on cybersecurity risk and capability that Anthropic had put out. And when they announced that they put it out, they said, hey guys, this is too dangerous for public release. So we're going to talk about it and we'll give it to the government and we'll give it to some large companies, tech companies, banks, and we'll let them test it, mess around with it. But we can't give it to you guys because it's just too dangerous. And so that project has been going on for the past few weeks, months where the government was messing around with it, the NSA was messing around with it, a bunch of these companies were messing around with it. And then Anthropic said, great, we can give it to you now, but we're going to do it heavily safeguarded.