How Trump’s Anthropic whiplash has helped China

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. Trump administration Okays Anthropic’s powerful Mythos-class AI models After placing export restrictions on Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models on June 12—effectively forcing their removal from the market—the Trump Commerce Department has now reversed course. But in the end, the sudden regulatory pivot may play to China’s advantage. Administration officials removed the controls Tuesday evening, after working with Anthropic for two weeks on a refined set of misuse protections. Anthropic promptly announced that it was turning Fable 5 back on for all customers, and turning on Mythos 5 for a select set of approved enterprise customers. The concern was that foreign actors might use Mythos or Fable to detect and exploit software vulnerabilities in U.S. government or enterprise systems, tasks for which Anthropic had said the models demonstrated surprising capacity. The Commerce Department also asked OpenAI to “stagger” the release of its latest frontier model, GPT-5.6. The government’s intervention rattled investors and tech industry folks because the Trump administration, after pledging to stay away from AI regulation, effectively granted itself a “kill switch” over newly released frontier models. The government has a legitimate interest in the national security implications of frontier models, but the administration had no ready framework for evaluating the national security risk of new models, or a minimum set of guardrails that AI providers must build in to prevent misuse of the models. Anthropic says it hopes the work it did with the Commerce Department over the past two weeks will lay the groundwork for a set of standards that could apply to all U.S. frontier model providers. The Trump administration’s sudden swerve into AI safety regulation may end up benefiting Chinese m