TBPN

The Hand Anthropic Was Dealt

June 15, 2026

Happy Monday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is the Trump admin ordering Anthropic to block Fable and Mythos access to foreign nationals.

Today’s Lineup

UFC fighter Bo Nickal at 11:00 AM
Atreides Management Managing Partner & CIO Gavin Baker at 11:30 AM
Public Co-Founder & Co-CEO Leif Abraham at 12:00 PM
Hydra Host Co-Founder & CEO Aaron Ginn at 12:40 PM
AppLovin Growth Marketing Rafael Vivas at 12:45 PM

Run of ShowAlamy

The Hand Anthropic Was Dealt

Dario Amodei was notably not ringside at UFC Freedom 250. Mark Zuckerberg was. Will this matter long-term? Hard to say, but the aesthetic differences between Anthropic and the Trump administration are quite staggering. Bridging the gap might be difficult, but it’s clearly something all Americans should care about. Private enterprises should be able to flourish in the United States and the government should be able to enact reasonable regulations to protect America’s interests.

Catching up on the play-by-play.

March 4th: Anthropic receives DoW supply-chain-risk letter
April 7th: Mythos Preview announcement, alongside Project Glasswing
June 9th: Fable 5 Launch (Mythos with guardrails around cyber, bio, and AI research)
June 12th: Fable 5 suspended after Commerce Department issues export control directive.

Anthropic explained in a blog post that the US government is restricting both Fable 5 and Mythos 5 from being used by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the US, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The sudden compliance burden here led to complete suspension of these models for all users, regardless of their nationality, and a firestorm of coverage over the weekend. The Information reported that Andy Jassy raised concerns with senior administration officials about the risk of jailbreaking Fable, Anthropic countered in their blog post saying: “We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.”

The rollout of Fable 5 has been rocky, with incredible demos and benchmarks offset by the odd decision to silently degrade the quality of answers related to frontier AI development instead of just refusing the request, like cyber and bio prompts. The rationale behind AI development refusal is sound. If a model doesn’t let you hack a system, just have the model build you an unrestricted model that does let you hack your target. But the choice to silently degrade responses was not well received.

These are important issues and there’s another timeline where AI leaders are cut from the same cloth as America’s elected officials, but we are in a world where Anthropic has to make their case for safety in an age of RSI during a UFC fight on the White House lawn. Most of the big tech CEOs have figured out how to work with the administration effectively, showing up to large dinners, photo ops, and movie screenings to make their case about hot topics. Many of these CEOs also have business relationships with Anthropic, so you’d hope they can potentially bridge the gap a bit and land the conversation on more stable ground. At the same time, they are always renegotiating contracts, and competing across multiple markets, so expect the 4D chess to be on full display in Washington all summer long. — John

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Headlines

Anthropic: Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Politico: Inside the whirlwind 24 hours that led the White House to slap export controls on Anthropic

Anthropic to meet with Trump administration over Mythos dispute

David Sacks: “I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true…”

Tyler Cowen: A few thoughts on the recent Mythos brouhaha

Ben Thompson: Anthropic’s Safety Superpower

WSJ: Anthropic Sued Over Limits on Its $200-a-Month AI Plans

OpenAI introduces OpenAI Partner Network

WSJ: OpenAI Investigated by Coalition of State Attorneys General

Executives and employees alike are struggling with Meta’s chaotic AI strategy, according to sources and internal discussions reviewed by WIRED

Satya Nadella: A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable