Some of Anthropic’s top staffers have rushed to Washington, DC, to try to reverse a White House crackdown on its “Mythos” and “Fable” AI models.
Senior members of Anthropic’s technical staff traveled to the nation’s capital over the weekend to meet with White House officials, a person close to the company told The Post on Monday. Anthropic staff have held virtual meetings with the Trump administration since the White House slapped export controls on Mythos and Fable last week.
Anthropic is committed to working with the Trump administration to resolve the dispute, the person said.
A Trump administration official said Anthropic’s team would meet in person with Commerce Department officials on Monday as part of those discussions.
The White House implemented the export controls on Friday after receiving intel from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy that their guardrails could be bypassed in a way that threatened national security. Anthropic responded by pulling the models offline entirely, stating it was the only way to ensure compliance and that it disagreed with the White House’s move.
The White House referred a request for comment to the Commerce Department, which did not immediately respond.
As The Post reported, White House officials were miffed that Anthropic downplayed the security flaw in Fable as a “narrow potential jailbreak” — meaning security guardrails could be bypassed — that was not unique to its models. That was despite frequent claims from CEO Dario Amodei and others that AI safety was their top priority.
A senior administration official said the White House received warnings from “nearly half a dozen” companies — not just Amazon — that raised concerns about Fable before the government took action.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and White House cyber director Sean Cairncross are among the officials who have engaged with Anthropic’s team on the security concerns.
Meanwhile, some notable cybersecurity officials have rallied to Anthropic’s defense and called on the Trump administration to reverse course on the export controls.
In a letter addressed to Lutnick and Cairncross, those officials said: “This action has taken the best models away from defenders, created market uncertainty, and risked America’s AI leadership without any real risk to justify it.”
The more than 40 signatories on the letter included cybersecurity executives from major firms like Adobe and Zoom, as well as former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos.
The experts argued that the “jailbreak” technique uncovered by Amazon and others is not a vulnerability unique to Fable and “can be replicated on GPT-5.5, Opus, Sonnet and even Chinese models like Kimi 2.7.”
Adam Thierer, a senior policy analyst at the think tank R Street Institute, called the Trump administration’s action a “significant escalation in the politicization of AI and centralization of control over advanced computation in this country” in a post on X.
The latest dispute with the White House is a major complication for Anthropic, which is already suing the administration over a move earlier this year by the Pentagon to label its AI models as a supply chain risk.
Anthropic has been racing to go public ahead of rival OpenAI – and now has to contend with its major product being made unavailable to consumers.
Amodei and other prominent tech CEOs are slated to be in Paris this week for the G7 Conference.
