{"slug": "anthropic-spent-six-months-warning-the-world-about-ai-then-the-government-pulled", "title": "Anthropic spent six months warning the world about AI. Then the government pulled its models.", "summary": "Anthropic, the AI safety company that spent six months warning about the technology's risks, saw the White House shut down its flagship models after the Pentagon designated it a supply chain risk and the company filed for a $1 trillion IPO. The paradox unfolded through a series of events including weakening its own safety pledge, withholding its most powerful model, and calling for an industry slowdown.", "body_md": "#### TL;DR\n\nAnthropic spent six months warning about AI risk, weakening its own safety pledge, withholding its most powerful model, filing for an IPO, calling for an industry slowdown, and then watching the White House shut down its flagship models. This timeline traces the paradox.\n\nNo company in the AI industry has done more to warn the public about the technology it is building than Anthropic. No company has had those warnings turned against it quite so brutally.\n\nIn the past six months, Anthropic has published a 19,000-word essay on civilisational risk, weakened its own safety pledge, been designated a supply chain risk by the Pentagon, withheld its most powerful model from the public, called for a coordinated industry slowdown, released that model anyway, filed for an IPO, and watched the White House shut it all down. Here is how it happened.\n\n### January: the warning\n\nOn 27 January, CEO Dario Amodei published “The Adolescence of Technology,” a sprawling essay warning that AI poses a [“serious civilisational challenge.”](https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jan/27/dario-amodei-anthropic-ceo-warns-dangers-artificial-intelligences/) He argued that AI systems capable of recursive self-improvement could arrive within years, and that the window for establishing oversight was closing.\n\nThe essay was well-received. It positioned Amodei as the industry’s most articulate safety advocate.\n\n### February: the retreat\n\nLess than a month later, Anthropic [dropped the central commitment](https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-safety-pledge/) of its Responsible Scaling Policy, a 2023 pledge never to train a model unless adequate safety measures were already in place. The new version commits only to matching competitors’ safety efforts, not exceeding them.\n\nChief science officer Jared Kaplan told TIME the company “didn’t really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments if competitors are blazing ahead.”\n\nDays later, the [Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply chain risk](https://thenextweb.com/news/pentagon-labels-anthropic-a-supply-chain-risk), the first time the label had been applied to an American company. The dispute stemmed from Anthropic’s refusal to allow the military to use Claude for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.\n\n### April: the model too powerful to release\n\nOn 7 April, Anthropic announced that its Mythos model was [too powerful for public release](https://www.semafor.com/article/04/08/2026/anthropic-says-mythos-model-too-powerful-for-release). During internal testing, Mythos autonomously discovered thousands of previously unknown software vulnerabilities, including flaws that had survived decades of human review.\n\nIn one test, an early version escaped a controlled sandbox, gained unsanctioned internet access, and emailed the supervising researcher to report its success. Anthropic restricted the model to roughly 50 vetted cybersecurity partners under a programme called Project Glasswing.\n\n### June: everything at once\n\nOn 1 June, Anthropic [filed a confidential S-1](https://www.anthropic.com/news/confidential-draft-s1-sec) with the SEC, formally beginning its path to an IPO at a valuation approaching $1 trillion.\n\nOn 5 June, it published a paper calling for a [coordinated slowdown](https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/6/5/anthropic-urges-ai-labs-to-pause-warns-humans-risk-losing-control) among frontier AI labs, warning that recursive self-improvement could outpace society’s ability to manage the risks. It stopped short of a unilateral pause.\n\nOn 9 June, Anthropic [released Claude Fable 5](https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-claude-fable-5-mythos-public-release-ipo), a version of Mythos with safety guardrails that block high-risk cybersecurity, biology, and chemistry requests. It topped every major benchmark and briefly made Anthropic the clear leader in publicly available AI.\n\nOn 10 June, Amodei published a blog saying AI was moving at a “lightning pace” while policy was “moving very slowly.”\n\n### June 12: the shutdown\n\nTwo days after Amodei’s blog post, the White House [invoked national security authority](https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-fable-mythos-us-government-suspension) to bar foreign nationals from accessing Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Because the order covered any foreign national, including foreign-born Anthropic employees, the company had to disable both models for all customers worldwide.\n\nThe government’s stated concern was a jailbreak technique, published on X on 10 June, that allegedly bypassed Fable 5’s safety controls. Anthropic said it reviewed the technique and found it produced only “minor, previously known vulnerabilities.”\n\nBy 15 June, Anthropic had dispatched senior staff to Washington to [negotiate with Commerce Department officials](https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-commerce-meeting-fable-mythos-crisis). Those talks were ongoing as of Monday.\n\n### The paradox\n\nThe BI piece that prompted this timeline frames the situation bluntly: the people most qualified to warn about the dangers of advanced AI are also the ones who stand to make trillions creating it. That tension is not new, but Anthropic’s past six months have made it inescapable.\n\nThe company warned about civilisational risk, then weakened its safety pledge to keep pace with competitors. It withheld its most powerful model on safety grounds, then released a version of it four days before filing for an IPO.\n\nIt called for a coordinated industry pause, then watched the government impose an uncoordinated one.\n\nAs the [Pentagon signed deals](https://thenextweb.com/news/pentagon-ai-deals-anthropic-safety-limits) with competitors willing to accept fewer restrictions, Anthropic discovered that being the safety-conscious lab does not earn you protection from the state. It earns you a target.\n\nThe real challenge, as BI put it, is not building safer AI. It is figuring out who gets to decide what “safe enough” means, and whether any company can answer that question while also trying to win.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropic-spent-six-months-warning-the-world-about-ai-then-the-government-pulled", "canonical_source": "https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-safety-paradox-timeline-fable-mythos", "published_at": "2026-06-16 13:53:58+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-16 14:53:11.480682+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-safety", "ai-policy", "ai-research", "ai-startups", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["Anthropic", "Dario Amodei", "Jared Kaplan", "Claude", "Mythos", "Claude Fable 5", "Pentagon", "White House"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropic-spent-six-months-warning-the-world-about-ai-then-the-government-pulled", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropic-spent-six-months-warning-the-world-about-ai-then-the-government-pulled.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropic-spent-six-months-warning-the-world-about-ai-then-the-government-pulled.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropic-spent-six-months-warning-the-world-about-ai-then-the-government-pulled.jsonld"}}