Three things to watch amid Anthropic’s latest feud with the US government

THE NEWS is full of how an ignominious peace deal with Iran exemplifies a decline in American power. That conclusion could hardly be more wrong. On June 12th the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to block foreigners from Fable and Mythos, its latest and most capable frontier AI models. In an instant, everyone learned that the American government can decide who may use the world’s most important technology. You don’t get much more powerful than that.

The administration was responding to a supposed jailbreak for Fable, meaning a prompt that circumvents defences against uses such as hacking computers or making bioweapons. The chances are that it wanted Anthropic to switch off the models for everyone, and that targeting foreigners was a means to an end. Sure enough, that is what Anthropic did, while claiming that the concern about its model was overblown. The legal basis of the order remains unclear, and the ban seems unlikely to last.

What matters, though, is the demonstration that global access to the best AI may come down to a decision in the Oval Office. The administration showed in March that it is prepared to trample on the frontier AI companies, when it designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk”. Now it has shown that it is prepared to trample on users, too.

America must decide how to wield this vast new power. The rest of the world must decide what to do about it. Even as it plans for an unreliable America in everything from defence to trade, it now has to cope with a new way of being captive to the world’s biggest economy.

This is not the first time America has tried to restrict access to frontier technologies. After the second world war it stopped helping Britain’s nuclear-weapons programme. When modern cryptography emerged in the 1970s, it blocked exports, before accepting the trade-off between having secure allies and using secrets to boost its own offensive capabilities. Uncle Sam still refuses to share its best military equipment, even with close allies. America kept the F-22 fighter for itself; allies got the F-35.

To control access to a technology, though, depends on its nature, and rivals’ ability to develop it independently. Nuclear co-operation with Britain resumed in the 1950s after it developed technology of its own; with other countries, America used the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968. Cryptography methods could not be contained and eventually went public. Many countries are capable of cyber-attacks.

Frontier AI has echoes of all these examples. If the very best models can disable crucial infrastructure or help users create pandemic-ready pathogens then, like nuclear weapons, they are too dangerous for public hands. But as with cryptography algorithms, it will be hard to be sure that advanced proprietary capabilities will never be copied. Open-weight models, which anyone can download, could advance and proliferate. In cyber-security a small imbalance can bring big advantages: if an attacker has version 5 while the defender is stuck with version 4, and the better model uncovers just one more vulnerability, the weaker party will be compromised. As AI is embedded in military hardware, a similar logic may apply on the battlefield.

Yet America has a huge economic interest in leading in AI and selling its tech to foreigners. Many Anthropic staff are not American and so were hit by the ban; to freeze AI research at America’s best lab would be self-defeating. The firm also says that 80% of its consumer use is overseas. As American technology has boomed over the past decade, Europe’s payments to America for intellectual-property products have risen fivefold. America should not want to give the rest of the world a reason to team up with China, the second-ranking AI power.