The Wild West of U.S. AI Regulation: What the Anthropic Standoff Means for the Entire Industry
It has been nearly a full week since the Trump administration issued an export control mandate to Anthropic, forcing one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence research labs to take its most advanced models offline. After days of closed-door negotiations between the AI firm and the White House, the two sides have yet to bridge their differences over how to restore access to Claude Mythos and Fable 5. The root of the impasse? It depends who you ask.
Throughout the entire standoff, Anthropic maintains it did not violate any formal protocols or explicit rules set by the Trump administration, according to an individual with direct knowledge of the company’s internal position. The White House, however, argues Anthropic acted recklessly, proving it cannot be trusted to roll out frontier AI technology safely and responsibly.
Watching this entire saga unfold has convinced me that we have officially entered the Wild West era of U.S. AI regulation. Very few binding federal laws are currently on the books governing frontier AI development, but that does not mean companies can avoid running afoul of the Trump White House when they cross unwritten, unspoken boundaries.
“The core problem here is that the White House has taken such an extreme anti-regulatory stance, and it is now suddenly confronting the real-world advanced AI capabilities that experts have been predicting for decades,” says a former White House technology official, who requested anonymity to protect their current professional relationships. “There should have been advance preparation and formal policies to address this systematically, balancing AI’s enormous benefits against its tangible risks. Instead, we’re stuck with this disorganized, last-minute approach that has left the entire AI industry in an impossible position.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly blocked efforts to implement mandatory safety guardrails for the AI industry, often arguing that formal rules would stifle U.S. innovation and leave the country lagging behind global competitors like China. Since returning to the Oval Office, President Trump has signed executive orders that rolled back a Biden-era initiative to build a national AI regulatory framework, and launched a federal task force to challenge state-level AI laws deemed unnecessarily burdensome for tech firms.
Over the past week, WIRED and other outlets have published partial details of the talks between Anthropic and the White House, but the core of the dispute remains largely shrouded in secrecy. At no point has the U.S. government publicly laid out a clear, specific account of exactly what Anthropic did wrong. The only official public update we have is a broad overview of the situation posted to X by White House technology advisor David Sacks.
Ironically, the White House’s actions have almost certainly damaged the very innovation it claims to prioritize. The Trump administration ordered Anthropic to block all foreign nationals from accessing Mythos and Fable 5, a restriction that cut off many of the AI lab’s own full-time employees from its most advanced work—work the company says has dramatically accelerated its research and development progress in recent months. Every one of Anthropic’s commercial customers is also locked out, including major tech firms like Apple and Meta, plus a large share of Fortune 500 companies.
The White House may well have had valid, legitimate reasons to raise concerns about Anthropic’s models. As my colleagues and I reported this past Wednesday, U.S. officials grew alarmed earlier this month after learning Anthropic had shared access to Mythos with SK Telecom, a South Korean telecom giant that U.S. officials allege has close ties to China. Separately, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns to U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that the built-in safety guardrails on Claude Fable 5, a secured variant of Mythos, could be easily bypassed.
Even if these concerns are rooted in genuine national security or safety worries, that does not excuse the White House’s messy handling of the situation. In the case of SK Telecom, Anthropic says it coordinated its rollout of Mythos directly with the U.S. government, meaning officials had ample opportunity to raise alarms about the partnership before the deal was finalized. Anthropic has worked with the South Korean firm for years, and the arrangement had never triggered any national security red flags before. And as we previously reported, once the White House did raise its concerns to Anthropic, the company immediately revoked SK Telecom’s access to the model.
As for the jailbreak concern, WIRED and other outlets have extensively documented that every large language model can be prompted to bypass its safety guardrails (the practice known as “jailbreaking”) to some degree. Anthropic and independent cybersecurity researchers both note that solving the jailbreak problem is not a simple, one-off fix. Because AI models generate outputs probabilistically, rather than following rigid deterministic rules, tech companies can never guarantee exactly what a model will produce in response to any given prompt. If the White House refuses to let Anthropic release Claude Fable 5 until the jailbreak issue is fully solved, we shouldn’t expect that model to launch anytime soon.
But ultimately, the core problem here is not that the U.S. government is trying to ensure advanced AI models have proper safety safeguards or stay out of the possession of U.S. adversaries. It is that the Trump administration has been forced to make these high-stakes regulatory decisions on the fly, with no formal framework to guide them.
I can confirm that other leading AI labs including OpenAI, Google, and Meta have been watching Anthropic’s predicament with intense, anxious focus. All week, I have asked AI executives the same pressing question: What steps will you take to avoid ending up in the same position as Anthropic?
So far, a clear majority of AI leaders have landed on the same conclusion: They believe they will have to grant the White House early access to all of their newest AI models. On top of that, they say they must be extremely proactive about sharing details of upcoming model launches with the Trump administration— the risk of catching government officials off-guard is simply too high to ignore.
“Advance notice, advance access. Those are the main asks we’ve heard, not just from the U.S. government, but from regulators across the world,” Aidan Gomez, CEO of Canadian AI lab Cohere, said in an interview earlier this week. “In a lot of ways, that makes sense. It reflects that authorities are deeply engaged and thinking carefully about this incredibly consequential technology.”
Last month, President Trump signed an executive order that established a “voluntary” system for AI labs to submit new models to the federal government for early safety testing. The order included an explicit carve-out stating that the process would never become a mandatory licensing regime, a key demand from the tech industry that had delayed the executive order’s finalization for months. But after what happened to Anthropic, it is clear that the Trump administration has effectively created an informal, ad hoc version of just such a mandatory regime. “Frankly, the Trump administration should never have claimed this was a voluntary system,” the former White House technology official said. “What they are doing now is very clearly a de facto licensing regime.”
This is an edition of Maxwell Zeff’s Model Behavior newsletter. Read previous newsletters here (link placeholder as in original).