The White House Is Making Up Its Rules for AI in Real Time

The Trump administration and AI lab Anthropic remain at odds over export controls that forced the company to pull its most advanced models offline, exposing a regulatory vacuum in which the White House is making rules for frontier AI in real time. Nearly one week after the directive was issued, the two sides disagree on whether Anthropic violated any established procedures. A person close to the company said Anthropic does not believe it broke concrete rules laid out by the administration, while the White House contends the lab behaved recklessly and cannot be trusted to safely deploy frontier technology [1]. The dispute centers on models Claude Mythos and Fable 5, developed by Anthropic, a San Francisco-based AI company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI members and valued at an estimated $965 billion as of May 2026 [2]. The Trump administration has repeatedly blocked efforts to impose guardrails on the AI industry, arguing that rules could hamper US innovation and allow rivals like China to pull ahead [1]. Since returning to office, President Trump has signed executive orders reversing a Biden-era effort to create a national AI framework and created a federal task force to challenge state laws deemed onerous [1]. Generative AI, the subfield encompassing large language models like Claude, has seen rapid commercial adoption since the 2020s AI boom, with applications ranging from chatbots to text-to-image and text-to-video generation [4]. A former White House technology official, speaking anonymously, said the administration's anti-regulatory posture left it unprepared. "The problem here is that the White House has been in this extreme anti-regulatory posture, and they're now faced with the real AI capabilities that people have been predicting for many years," the official said. "There should have been preparation and policies to systematically deal with this, managing the benefits and risks, but instead it's just this slap-dash approach that puts the AI industry in a real quandary" [1]. The administration's actions have disrupted Anthropic's operations and customer access. The directive prohibits all foreign nationals from accessing Mythos and Fable 5, locking out many of Anthropic's own employees and all of its customers, including Apple, Meta, and much of the Fortune 500 [1]. Anthropic says the models had accelerated its research and development in recent months [1]. US officials grew concerned after learning Anthropic shared Mythos with SK Telecom, a South Korean telecom giant they allege has ties to China. Separately, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that some guardrails on Claude Fable 5 could be circumvented [1]. Anthropic says it coordinated with the US government on the Mythos rollout and revoked SK Telecom's access immediately when concerns were raised [1]. Other AI labs are drawing lessons from the episode. Aidan Gomez, CEO of Canadian AI lab Cohere, said in an interview that advance notice and advance access are "the primary asks that we've heard, not just from the US, but others around the world" [1]. Last month, President Trump signed an executive order creating what it called a voluntary system for AI labs to submit models for early testing, with a carve-out stating it would not become a mandatory licensing regime [1]. The former White House technology official said that framing now rings hollow: "The Trump administration, frankly, should not have said that this was a voluntary regime. It seems very clear that what they are now doing is a licensing regime" [1]. The standoff highlights the broader challenge of governing AI systems that are probabilistic rather than deterministic, meaning companies cannot guarantee exactly what a model will generate in response to a given prompt [1]. AI safety and the potential for unintended harms have prompted growing discussions around regulation globally [3].