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.
The Algae Is Always Greener
At the White House, President Donald Trump has been furiously posting on Truth Social about the negative coverage of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, which has been beset with algae blooms and flaps of blue sealant that have appeared to detach from the pool’s floor following the president’s $16.4 million renovation.
After Trump claimed that several people were arrested for alleged vandalism to the renovations, an administration official declined to clarify what activities around the reflecting pool would be considered a crime. And on Tuesday, the administration also started erecting fencing around the pool.
The National Guard assigned to the reflecting pool have been instructed since last week to detain anyone even touching the water—let alone any sealant flaps—so that US Park Police could arrest them on vandalism-related charges, two people familiar with the matter said.
The statute being cited for what is prohibited has been 36 Code of Federal Regulations, Chapter 1, Section 2.1(a)(6), according to an administration official, which prohibits “possessing, destroying, injuring, defacing, removing, digging, or disturbing a structure or its furnishing or fixtures, or other cultural or archeological resources.”
Another statute, 36 CFR 7.96, prohibits “bathing, swimming or wading in any fountain or pool” other than the Rainbow Pool of the World War II memorial, and the German-American Friendship Garden fountains, adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
It’s not clear whether placing a hand in the water violated either of those statutes. But Inner Loop does not think it is worth the risk of a misdemeanour citation to find out.
This is an edition of Hugo Lowell’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
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