The week that changed AI: Inside Trump’s Anthropic crackdown, and how a phone call from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy triggered the chaos

The moment that triggered the Trump administration’s dramatic crackdown on Anthropic, and may completely reset the ground rules for U.S. regulation of AI, happened almost by accident. 

And it was sparked by one of Anthropic’s top investors: Amazon. 

Last week, researchers at Amazon were busy stress-testing Anthropic’s newly released Fable 5, a “safe” version of Anthropic’s Mythos AI model. Anthropic had repeatedly said that its Mythos-class models had superhuman software hacking skills that were too dangerous to be released to the general public. Fable 5, which Anthropic launched on June 9, was equipped with what it said were robust safeguards against cybersecurity risks. 

The Amazon researchers testing Fable, however, discovered a “jailbreak” that they documented as allowing users to bypass safety rails and access information that could be used in a cyberattack. Amazon promptly notified Anthropic. But the situation suddenly escalated when Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy happened to be on a pre-scheduled call with White House officials last Thursday, June 11, regarding an unrelated topic, according to two sources familiar with Amazon. Jassy brought up the vulnerability his team had found, and White House officials encouraged him to flag the issue directly to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the sources said.

Jassy spoke to Bessent that same day. He told the treasury secretary about the Fable jailbreak but also stressed that he was concerned about the cyber capabilities of all of the frontier AI models, including those from other labs. Bessent has been leading the administration’s response to Anthropic’s Mythos model, largely because of the threat Mythos-powered cyberattacks could pose to the global financial system. His phone call with Jassy set in motion a chain of events that quickly became international news. 

By Friday evening, just four days after Fable’s launch, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick had hit Anthropic with unprecedented export controls, forcing the lab to pull its most powerful models. The move marked the first time the U.S. government stepped in to explicitly limit the release of a frontier AI model, triggering a wave of tech and political alarm around the world. Since then, cybersecurity experts, AI policy thinkers, American officials, and foreign governments have fiercely debated the consequences, questioning whether the Trump Administration’s heavy-handed decision sets a dangerous precedent, or if it reflects wise caution. 

The stage for the watershed decision had been set months earlier, as the Trump administration wrangled with Anthropic over a separate issue involving its contract with the Pentagon, a fight that deepened a growing animosity toward the San Francisco AI company within the circle of tech policy officials in Trump’s orbit. It was further primed by the surging unease within national security agencies as Anthropic began expanding access to Mythos to an broader roster of companies.

For Anthropic, which recently closed a $65 billion funding round at a valuation of $965 billion and has filed paperwork to list its shares on the public markets, the export controls represent an existential threat at a time when rivals OpenAI, SpaceX, and Google are competing aggressively to dominate the AI business.

Many of the details of the weeklong showdown between Anthropic and the Trump administration are still emerging, and efforts to resolve the situation are fluid. Fortune spoke to more than a half dozen people involved on various sides of the situation to piece together how it happened and what it could mean going forward. 

An ultimatum, and a flurry of frantic calls

On Friday, following Jassy’s phone call with Bessent, the administration contacted Anthropic and Chief Executive Dario Amodei, demanding that they either fix the jailbreak or remove the models from the market. According to a source familiar with Anthropic, the warning........

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