Anthropic disables new AI model after White House security directive

By — Stephanie Sy Stephanie Sy By — Jackson Hudgins Jackson Hudgins Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/anthropic-disables-new-ai-model-after-white-house-security-directive Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Audio The Trump administration forced Anthropic, one of the country’s leading artificial intelligence companies, to disable its new and powerful AI model, citing security concerns. It’s an unprecedented move that comes as the government struggles to define the guardrails for an industry whose technology is rapidly advancing. Stephanie Sy discussed more with Amrith Ramkumar of The Wall Street Journal. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. Amna Nawaz: The Trump administration has forced Anthropic, one of the country's leading artificial intelligence companies, to disable its newest and most powerful A.I. models, citing, the company says, unspecified national security concerns. It's an unprecedented move that comes as the federal government struggles to define the guardrails for an industry whose technology is advancing at a rapid pace. Stephanie Sy has more. Stephanie Sy: Amna, Anthropic has reportedly been in talks with the Trump administration since the weekend, trying to restore access to users of its latest A.I. models. On Friday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns, telling White House officials that researchers had found a way to get through the model Fable 5's guardrails, posing a cybersecurity risk. The president agreed, and his team abruptly slapped foreign export restrictions on the company. Anthropic said the only way for it to comply was to cut off access to all its users of Fable 5 and the even more advanced Mythos 5, billed as some of the most powerful A.I. tools available on the market. For more, we're joined now by Amrith Ramkumar, tech policy reporter for The Wall Street Journal, who has been covering this all closely. This is a tremendous clash, an A.I. company that was recently valued at almost $1 trillion facing off against the Trump administration. What led to such a drastic action by the White House over the weekend? Amrith Ramkumar, The Wall Street Journal: It is truly remarkable. This is the first time that we know about that the government has essentially told the leading A.I. company that its models aren't safe for public consumption and need to be shut off. And the concern specifically among administration officials is that users could enter prompts into this model of Fable 5 specifically that could get around safeguards that were designed to avoid cyberattacks, bioweapons, and other bad things. So we don't know a ton of specifics because they haven't released much about what exactly the Amazon folks found that was so alarming. But the fact that there was this concern alarmed people in the White House, and they took the drastic a