Hegseth, White House allies intensify attacks on Anthropic

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took a shot at Anthropic on Saturday, after the artificial intelligence company discontinued access to two of its models to comply with a directive from the Trump administration.

“Three months ago, @DeptofWar kicked @AnthropicAI out of our building—forever. Every passing day proves why that was the right move,” Hegseth wrote on the social platform X.

Earlier this year, Hegseth labeled Anthropic as a supply chain risk and prohibited the use of its Claude AI chat bot within the Pentagon. Anthropic has sued the administration over the designation, which came after the firm’s CEO, Dario Amodei, sought to ensure that the government would not use the tool for fully autonomous lethal weapons or mass domestic surveillance of Americans.

The latest clash between Anthropic and the administration was over the company’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. After the administration issued an export control directive to “suspend all access” to the models by foreign nationals, Anthropic said Friday that it had to disable access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all customers to comply.

In a statement, the company noted that it believes that the government issued the order after discovering a method of “bypassing” Fable 5, also known as “jailbreaking.”

Anthropic added, “We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.”

Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order stating that AI labs can voluntarily provide the government with their models for a period of up to 30 days before they plan to release them publicly.

Amodei backed the order earlier this week and proposed mandatory testing of AI models by a third-party auditor to check for risks related to cybersecurity, biological weapons, loss of control of AI systems and automated research and development.

But on Friday, Anthropic said that the latest directive from the administration was unnecessary and would “essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers” across the AI industry.

“As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts,” the company stated. “This action does not adhere to those principles.”

But David Sacks, a special adviser to Trump on AI and cryptocurrency from January 2025 to this past March, said Saturday that Anthropic’s response to the directive “is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research” firm.

“The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release,” Sacks wrote on X. “The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.”

Administration officials and allies are not alone in their support of the order, however. Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly (Ariz.) said Sunday that issuing the directive was the right call, and AI companies should be “incredibly careful” when releasing their models.

“I think Anthropic is a good example, [it] seems to be willing to work with the federal government on this to make sure that we do not make a mistake and release something that we will later regret,” he told host Margaret Brennan on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”

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David Sacks

Donald Trump

Margaret Brennan

Mark Kelly

Pete Hegseth

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