U.S. President Donald Trump has publicly walked back his view of AI company Anthropic as a national security threat, just days after a G7 summit meeting with CEO Dario Amodei. In an interview with Axios published June 19, Trump said he no longer considers Anthropic or its leadership a danger, contrasting with the administration's tough stance earlier in June.
The reversal comes after the Commerce Department on June 12 ordered Anthropic to restrict foreign access to its advanced Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, citing a vulnerability report that Trump says originated from a "competitor who was also an owner" — a description matching Amazon, which has invested $8 billion in the company. Anthropic took both models offline within 90 minutes, unable to enforce nationality-based access controls.
Trump praised Amodei's quick response and said invoking the Defense Production Act was now unlikely. However, the export-control order remains in force, and the Pentagon’s March 3 supply-chain risk designation has not been rescinded. The public softening followed a working lunch at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains on June 17, where Amodei pitched a U.S.-led AI coalition that would coordinate frontier AI standards among democracies, deliberately excluding China.
The political reprieve carries significant financial weight for Anthropic, which confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1 targeting an October 2026 Nasdaq listing at a $965 billion post-money valuation. The export controls had threatened to derail the offering, which would be the largest tech IPO since Facebook in 2012.
In a separate boost, Nobel Prize-winning scientist John Jumper, who shared the 2024 chemistry Nobel for developing AlphaFold at Google DeepMind, announced he is leaving the company to join Anthropic. Jumper’s move adds immense research firepower and marks the third senior DeepMind exit in three months, reinforcing Anthropic's position in the competitive AI talent race.
