Trump Administration Eases Communication with Anthropic After CEO Dario Amodei's Departure

The Trump administration has been happier talking to Anthropic lately, according to people familiar with the matter: They don’t have to deal with CEO Dario Amodei anymore, because he’s been replaced in meetings about re-releasing the Claude Fable 5 AI model by his cofounder Tom Brown. “Tom Brown is not being a weirdo like Dario and can actually engage,” said one person directly familiar with the calls. The administration has not yet lifted the export controls that took Anthropic’s most powerful models offline on June 12 after the National Security Agency affirmed there were ways to disable guardrails and access the more powerful capabilities of the company’s restricted Mythos model.

But the administration has had multiple calls with Anthropic in recent days, encouraged by the fact that Brown and Anthropic’s public policy chief, Sarah Heck, have been leading the outreach. Amodei, the people say, was too difficult to talk to and did not listen to their concerns. The talks have been both at the high level and at the working-group level, involving technical staff from both sides.

Some of the conversations have been about trying to establish what level of proof from Anthropic’s side might alleviate the administration’s concerns about jailbreaks of Fable 5, the people say. As Inner Loop previously noted, part of the challenge for both sides is on a conceptual level. Independent cybersecurity experts have increasingly taken the view that guardrails on AI models are only a stopgap, since skilled users and future AI models will find ways to bypass constraints.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment on the matter. A spokesperson for Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment. The timeline for Anthropic being able to re-deploy Fable 5 remains uncertain.

But what the company needs to do to lift the export controls could become clearer in the coming days. Last week, a bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a list of questions about the path forward for Anthropic to Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who has taken a leading role in addressing jailbreak risks in part because the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security manages export controls. Among the questions in the letter was one on redeployment: “What specific criteria does the Department rely upon for determining whether to restore public access to the model through a revision of this decision?

What is the timeline for that decision?” The letter, signed by representatives Sam Liccardo, Jay Obernolte, C. Scott Franklin, and Ted Lieu, demanded responses by June 26. A Commerce Department spokesperson declined to comment on whether the agency would respond by the deadline.