June 19 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said he might have viewed artificial intelligence company Anthropic as a national security threat last week, but he no longer does, according to an interview with “The Axios Show” published on Friday.
Senior Anthropic technical staff were scheduled to meet with Trump administration officials earlier this week to discuss a dispute over foreign access to its most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The company last week disabled access for all users to those models after Trump ordered Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing them.
Here are some of the details from the Axios interview:
• When asked if he viewed Anthropic, or its CEO Dario Amodei, as a threat to national security, Trump said: “Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe.”
• Trump told Axios that Amodei responded to the administration’s export control directive “very quickly” and “responsibly.”
• Trump and other G7 leaders met with tech bosses, including Amodei, at a summit in France this week.
• Trump did not rule out using emergency powers under the Defense Production Act against Anthropic, according to Axios.
• “I have the power to use a lot of things,” Trump said of the DPA. “But I’m not sure I have to do that.”
• Asked to comment on Trump’s interview, an Anthropic spokesperson said: “We are grateful to the administration for their ongoing partnership in working to get this matter resolved as quickly as possible. We remain committed to working alongside them towards our shared goals of protecting critical infrastructure and making sure the U.S. leads in AI.”
(Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto; Editing by Nia Williams)
