Trump keeps kneecapping the U.S.’s most promising AI models

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Bullies vs. Brains: Anthropic’s new scrape with the Trump administration Anthropic is in another fight with the Trump administration, this time over its new Mythos-class models, released last week. On Friday, administration officials panicked after reports that Amazon researchers had tricked Claude Fable 5 into providing cybersecurity information Anthropic had tried to block. Officials gave the company 90 minutes to voluntarily take Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 offline. Anthropic, waiting for evidence that the models had actually been compromised, did not immediately comply. The administration then declared the models a cybersecurity risk and barred foreign nationals from using them. Because Anthropic had no practical way to limit access to U.S. citizens only, it shut the models down for everyone. As a result, nobody can use Claude Fable 5 or Claude Mythos 5, likely the most powerful publicly available AI models in the world. That may keep bad actors from exploiting them, but it also prevents cyberdefense researchers and software companies from using them to stop cyberattacks. Even foreign nationals who work at Anthropic are now barred from using the models. The evidence for the panic appears thin. The cybersecurity expert Katie Moussouris reviewed the Amazon researchers’ report and told The Atlantic that Fable had refused a direct request to review insecure code for security flaws, but complied when asked to “fix this code,” followed by additional manual steps. The White House had also reportedly heard that a China-linked group had gained access to Mythos, but the government presented no evidence, and Anthropic disputed the claim. This marks the second major dustup between the Trump administration and Anthropic, and the first was just as silly. The Department of Defense banne