The Trump administration’s disagreement with Anthropic over its most advanced AI models appears to be fast coming to a head.
Trump officials tell Inner Loop that if Anthropic wants to rerelease Claude Fable 5, the AI model that they took offline with export controls last week over concerns about jailbreaking—a method of using prompts to get around a model’s safeguards—the company will need to take steps to actually address what the government alleges are vulnerabilities.
Anthropic has said for days that the administration’s concerns are overblown and that the effects of the jailbreaks are minimal. It reiterated this position to the Commerce Department and the Office of the National Cyber Director, Sean Cairncross, in a technical meeting on Monday.
But officials say they are past arguing whether the jailbreaks are significant, since the National Security Agency concluded that there are ways to disable guardrails on Fable 5, which are put in place to prevent users from accessing capabilities of the Mythos model related to cybersecurity, chemistry, and biology
At this stage, the administration essentially views the situation as Anthropic’s problem to fix, according to three people familiar with discussions.
Neither the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation nor the National Security Agency has the staff or the bandwidth to be drawn into chasing down every conceivable jailbreak on every model that reaches the market, the people said.
As a result, the administration believes that Anthropic should be more proactive about continually testing not just Fable 5 but all of its frontier AI models to find potential jailbreaks and flag them to the government themselves.
But on a more fundamental level, it remains unclear how Anthropic is supposed to prevent jailbreaking.
Independent cybersecurity experts have increasingly taken the view that guardrails on AI models are only a stopgap solution, since skilled users and future AI models will find ways to bypass constraints—meaning that what the White House appears to want cannot be done.
A White House spokesperson declined to comment.
DNI = Do Not Invite
At the start of the week, Trump’s pick to serve as Acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, was on track to never even start the job. Now, Trump has thrown him a lifeline—and it’s the permanent DNI nominee, Jay Clayton, who now faces the prospect of never serving in the role.
To recap: Trump initially named Pulte, his housing finance chief, to replace outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard.
Faced with bipartisan pushback because Pulte doesn’t have the national security experience required by law for the role and because he flagged allegedly questionable mortgage fraud accusations against Trump’s political enemies, Trump announced Clayton, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, as his nominee for a permanent DNI.
Gabbard was scheduled to depart June 18, with Pulte’s first day set for June 19. But Senate Republicans wondered, if Clayton could have his hearing fast-tracked to June 17 and start by June 22, would Pulte even get into the building?
On Wednesday, Trump blew up the plan. As part of a wider feud with Senate Republican leadership over the filibuster, Trump announced Clayton’s hearing would be delayed indefinitely, in an apparent effort to prevent Pulte from getting jumped. Senate Republicans then announced that the hearing would proceed, unless Clayton didn’t appear or his nomination was withdrawn.
The situation may be a body blow for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which Trump has directed Pulte to vastly downsize, and staffers have been unimpressed by what they see as Pulte’s minimal effort to get to know the agency and lack of regular briefings, people familiar with the matter said.
They have also sniped internally that Pulte appeared to them eager to get the perks of being DNI—the role comes with a security detail and often travel on government jets —without doing the often thankless work of producing sober intelligence briefings and corralling the nation’s intelligence agencies.
A White House spokesperson declined to comment, referring Inner Loop to Trump’s announcement on Truth Social.
Influence at the UFC
Last week, Inner Loop reported on how White House aides expected a parade of donors and corporate executives to attend UFC Freedom 250 over the weekend in an effort to get close to Trump and senior officials from the administration.
The donors and executives duly showed up, both on fight night and at a number of parties held on the sidelines.
Among the notable attendees was Paramount CEO David Ellison, who got approval from the Justice Department’s antitrust division last week to acquire Warner Bros Discovery. Also there was Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who at one point was spotted talking to Trump.
Earlier in the weekend, Meta hosted a private party at the Ned’s Club overlooking the White House, attended by a number of Trump officials including the acting attorney general Todd Blanche, White House deputy chief of staff James Blair, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and interior secretary Doug Burgum.
Also there were some Trump family members—Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, as well as Kai Trump—who mingled with other guests including former Clinton strategist Adrienne Elrod, Axios cofounders Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, Fox News host Shannon Bream, Washington AI network founder Tammy Haddad, and former Trump strategist Kellyanne Conway.
This is an edition of Hugo Lowell’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
