US President Donald Trump stated he might have viewed AI firm Anthropic as a national security threat last week, but no longer does, according to an interview with “The Axios Show” published on Friday.
Anthropic’s technical staff were set to meet with Trump administration officials earlier this week to discuss a dispute over foreign access to its most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The company disabled access for all users to those models after Trump ordered Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing them.
In the Axios interview, when asked if he viewed Anthropic or its CEO Dario Amodei as a threat to national security, Trump said: “Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe.” He told Axios that Amodei responded to the administration’s export control directive “very quickly” and “responsibly.”
Trump and other G7 leaders met with tech bosses, including Amodei, at a summit in France this week. Trump did not rule out using emergency powers under the Defence Production Act against Anthropic.
An Anthropic spokesperson said: “We are grateful to the administration for their ongoing partnership in working to get this matter resolved as quickly as possible. We remain committed to working alongside them towards our shared goals of protecting critical infrastructure and making sure the US leads in AI.”