President Donald Trump has said that Anthropic no longer poses a national security threat, that signal the end of a ten-day export control standoff.
“He responded to us very quickly, because you know it’s tremendous liability,” Trump told media, referring to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Asked directly whether he considered Anthropic a national security threat, Trump said, “Well, not now. But a week ago, maybe.”
Trump confirmed he would not shut down Anthropic, framing the standoff as largely resolved.
“I would, but I’m not sure I have to do that. I think so far it’s been very responsible,” he said. “It was a competitor and a part owner that turned Anthropic in. They didn’t like what they were doing. They were very concerned. Think of it, it’s part owner, and I think it worked out very well, I think.”
The president also credited a competitor and part-owner for alerting his administration to the concern in the first place. The remarks align with prior reporting that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns about Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 capabilities to senior Trump administration officials before the export control order came down.
The ten-day standoff began on June 12 when the US government directed Anthropic to disable Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 for all users globally, citing a potential jailbreak that would allow the model to assist with cyberattacks. Anthropic complied but publicly disputed the reasoning, saying it had received only verbal evidence of the alleged vulnerability and that the applied standard would effectively halt all new frontier model deployments industry-wide if applied consistently.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump AI adviser David Sacks had both publicly attacked Anthropic during the week, while dozens of security leaders from NVIDIA, Zoom, and Mercedes-Benz signed an open letter demanding the government restore access.
The Commerce Department has not yet formally lifted the export control order, and Fable 5 and Mythos 5 remain offline as of publication, though Trump’s comments strongly indicate a reversal is imminent.
The standoff traces partly to a broken contract negotiation between Anthropic and the Pentagon, which declared Anthropic a supply chain risk after talks collapsed over the company’s refusal to permit its technology for mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons.
Anthropic is suing to overturn that designation.
