The Trump administration’s decision to cut foreign access to Anthropic’s most powerful AI models was reportedly triggered by calls from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Jassy contacted senior government officials on Thursday after Amazon researchers discovered a way to prompt Anthropic’s Fable 5 model into returning information that could be used for cyberattacks.
The call, along with warnings from at least five other firms, led to a frantic shuffle within the White House to gauge the threat and contact Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who reportedly pushed back on the administration’s concerns and requests to voluntarily pull the model.
“In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly,” said David Sacks, the co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, on Saturday. “It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue).”
Source: David Sacks
The episode sheds light on what led to the US directive that forced Anthropic to pull its new model from the public on Friday night. Anthropic Claude is estimated to have around 18,900 monthly active users.
In a blog post on Friday, Anthropic said it believed the US directive was the result of a misunderstanding about the threat posed by a “non-universal jailbreak,” which came from an unnamed report.
Amazon did not confirm if it spoke to government officials about Anthropic’s models.
“As a leading cloud provider that serves a large number of private and public sector customers, it’s not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks,” a spokesperson said. “When they occur, we don’t share the details of these discussions.”
Anthropic said it is working to restore access for its users.
“The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue,” Sacks said, which would see the export control lifted, and Fable goes back into general release.
“The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible.”
AI tokens surge after Anthropic crackdown
The episode has also demonstrated the US government’s ability to promptly switch off access to US-based AI models on command, leading to a rally in decentralized AI tokens on Friday and Saturday.
The native token of Bittensor, a decentralized AI protocol that lets people build and monetize artificial intelligence models, which some refer to as “the Bitcoin of AI,” surged 23.9% over the past 24 hours.
Venice Token (VVV), the native utility and privacy coin powering Venice AI, a decentralized, uncensored AI platform founded by Erik Voorhees, rose 16%.
Near Protocol, a blockchain project building the infrastructure to support a decentralized AI agent economy, rose 6.2%.
Source: Erik Voorhees
