At the heart of Anthropic’s clashes with the U.S. government, a decision not to play by the new rules of Trump’s Washington

On Friday, Open AI announced it was withholding the wide release of its latest AI model, GPT-5.6, at the request of the U.S. government. On the same day, the U.S. Commerce Department told Anthropic that export controls it had slapped on that company’s powerful Mythos AI model would be relaxed, following a two-week period in which the export ban had forced Anthropic to disable the model for all users. At first glance, it might seem like the two frontier AI labs are in a similar position in President Donald Trump’s Washington. But nothing could be further from the truth. Anthropic has had a far rougher ride in Trump’s D.C. than OpenAI, or pretty much any other tech company. Twice now the administration has taken unprecedented actions that pose a potentially existential risk to the startup, which is valued at $965 billion and which has filed paperwork for an IPO that is expected in the coming months. First, in April, the Pentagon labelled Anthropic a “supply chain risk” after it refused to accept contract language that the Pentagon was insisting upon. Then, two weeks ago, it got hit with export controls on Mythos as well as Fable, a version of the same model built for wider commercial release—after the discovery of a Fable jailbreak that could allow users to circumvent guardrails designed to prevent users from accessing Mythos’ full cyber capabilities. Trump administration officials have repeatedly engaged in vitriolic attacks against the company, and its CEO Dario Amodei. Trump himself posted on social media that the company consisted of “leftwing nut jobs” who were trying to “strong-arm the Department of War” (the Pentagon, recently renamed by Trump) when the administration took the decision to label the company a “supply chain risk.” During the same dispute, Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, posted on X that “it’s a shame that Dario Amodei is a liar and has a God-complex.” Michael’s boss, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, c