This was the first time the federal government has caused a leading AI company to retract its systems from public use, heralding a new era of government AI oversight.
President Donald Trump; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Getty Images file.
June 16, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT
By Jared Perlo, Julie Tsirkin and David Ingram
It was only a passing reference to a security finding about AI giant Anthropic’s Fable 5 model on a call between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and officials from the Trump administration. But it set off a chain of events that ended with Anthropic’s decision last week to take down its two most powerful AI systems from public use.
The detail mentioned in the call set off a frantic scramble within the White House, ballooning into an attempt to clamp down on a perceived national security risk, melding sensitivities over the power of cutting-edge AI systems with diverging understandings of a specific technical concern, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.
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