Trump Softens on Anthropic After Amodei Plays Nice at G7 🤝

President Donald Trump told The Axios Show that he considered Anthropic a national security threat one week ago, but said relations with the AI company have since improved after CEO Dario Amodei responded quickly to White House concerns. "Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe," Trump said during a wide-ranging interview with Axios journalist Marc Caputo. The president said he walked away from the recent G7 summit viewing Amodei as "nice" and "smart" following their direct conversations. "He responded to us very quickly because you know it's a tremendous liability," Trump said, adding that "people get put in prison immediately for that. You can't play games with that."

The controversy stems from a Commerce Department export ban on Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, which restricted any country outside the US and foreign nationals within the country from accessing the company's most advanced AI systems last week. Trump revealed that Amazon, both a competitor and a part-owner of Anthropic, alerted the administration to a serious vulnerability. "It was a competitor and a part owner that turned Anthropic in," Trump said. "They didn't like what they were doing. They were very concerned. Think of it, it's a part owner, and I think it worked out very well. I think."

Asked whether he would invoke the Defense Production Act to control national AI development, Trump said he is not sure he needs to. "I would, but I'm not sure I have to do that. I think so far it's been very responsible," he said. According to Politico, the White House and Anthropic are now drafting a joint risk framework to assess the severity of AI security flaws and guide when the government should intervene in future incidents involving frontier AI models. Negotiators are working to define how far safeguards were bypassed, what capabilities were exposed, and the real-world consequences of any breach, with the talks offering a potential pathway toward restoring access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5.