For almost two weeks, high-ranking team members at Anthropic have been in talks with the Trump Administration, trying to get a highly restrictive export control directive lifted. According to a new report from Wired, these talks weren’t going well, and that was at least in part because CEO Dario Amodei was involved, but it’s being reported that since Amodei left the talks, things are looking up. Per Wired, the White House is now talking to Tom Brown, another Anthropic co-founder (that’s his entire job title according to his LinkedIn). An anonymous person involved in the calls reportedly told Wired “Tom Brown is not being a weirdo like Dario and can actually engage.” Amodei was reportedly hard to deal with, and, Wired’s sources claim, wasn’t being a good listener.
Past reporting has claimed Amodei has a tendency to “rant” and that he “cannot control his emotions.” If you’ve ever seen videos of Amodei, including ones made in friendly circumstances, you’ll know his natural facial expression is a bit queasy, that he has a trumpet-like speaking voice, that he waves his arms when he speaks, and that he will sometimes not just break eye contact but tilt his whole head toward the ground while speaking.
Judging from what’s online, Brown has an overall nervous nerd speaking style, but a much warmer and more traditionally personable version. He seems to smile easily, and his voice is much softer and steadier than Amodei’s.
Wired says Brown is working on the talks alongside Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s Head of Public Policy. Her conversation style—again, from what’s online—comes across as enthusiastic and on-message, but also quite disciplined and cautious, the attributes a job as head of public policy would likely require.
Anthropic needs the White House to clear its Claude Fable 5 AI model, the most advanced frontier model Anthropic makes available to consumers, for general use once again. Anthropic calls Fable 5 a “Mythos-class” model, meaning it’s made with the same core technology as Claude Mythos Preview which Anthropic deemed too dangerous to be accessed by the public.
Fable 5 came ostensibly stripped of capabilities that made it a potential cybersecurity threat, but according to multiple sources, Amazon researchers notified the White House shortly after it was released that jailbreaks could supposedly remove these safeguards easily. Before learning about the jailbreak issue, the White House was reportedly already worried that potential bad actors affiliated with Chinese interests had accessed the model, so it issued the export control order about three days after Fable 5 was released. It required Anthropic to prevent non-U.S. nationals from using Fable 5 (along with another, much more exclusive model, Mythos 5).
Anthropic announced that it had pulled Fable 5 offline on June 12. Talks between Anthropic and the White House began shortly thereafter.