On Friday, OpenAI announced it was withholding the wide release of its latest AI model, GPT-5.6, at the request of the U.S. government. On the same day, the U.S. Commerce Department told Anthropic that export controls it had slapped on that company’s powerful Mythos AI model would be relaxed, following a two-week period in which the export ban had forced Anthropic to disable the model for all users.
At first glance, it might seem like the two frontier AI labs are in a similar position in President Donald Trump’s Washington. But nothing could be further from the truth. Anthropic has had a far rougher ride in Trump’s D.C. than OpenAI, or pretty much any other tech company.
Twice now the administration has taken unprecedented actions that pose a potentially existential risk to the startup, which is valued at $965 billion and which has filed paperwork for an IPO that is expected in the coming months. First, in April, the Pentagon labelled Anthropic a “supply chain risk” after it refused to accept contract language that the Pentagon was insisting upon. Then, two weeks ago, it got hit with export controls on Mythos as well as Fable, a version of the same model built for wider commercial release—after the discovery of a Fable jailbreak that could allow users to circumvent guardrails designed to prevent users from accessing Mythos’ full cyber capabilities.
