If you've been following my reporting on the Trump phone, you'll know that Trump Mobile doesn't exactly keep open lines of communication with the media. That doesn't look to be changing, with the company no longer working with its long-term media relations firm.
Poplar Group has represented Trump Mobile since at least last June, when the company's founding partner Chris Walker gave a statement to USA Today, insisting at the time that "T1 …
OpenAI is bulking up before its IPO, landing Transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer from Google DeepMind and former Trump AI policy official Dean Ball in the same week.
In May, the federal government announced without warning that it would take apart a network of ocean monitoring systems that it had spent over $350 million to build. No reason was given for the decision to shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), but suspicion immediately focused on the network's role in tracking climate change.
But the OOI also provides data that's useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to widespread opposition. Today, it appears that the opposition has won, as the government will announce that it's reversing the decision. The big remaining question is how much damage the OOI took during the intervening month.
As of now, there is no formal statement available from the federal government. However, The New York Times reports that the decision will be announced later today, and Ars received a statement from Zoe Lofgren, the ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, indicating that the decision has been made.
In May, the federal government announced without warning that it would take apart a network of ocean monitoring systems that it had spent over $350 million to build. No reason was given for the decision to shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), but suspicion immediately focused on the network's role in tracking climate change.
But the OOI also provides data that's useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to widespread opposition. Today, it appears that the opposition has won, as the government will announce that it's reversing the decision. The big remaining question is how much damage the OOI took during the intervening month.
As of now, there is no formal statement available from the federal government. However, The New York Times reports that the decision will be announced later today, and Ars received a statement from Zoe Lofgren, the ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, indicating that the decision has been made.
Bernie Sanders has unveiled an aggressive plan to transfer trillions from leading AI firms to the public, and, to the likely horror of AI firms, it goes even further than expected to give Americans more control over the AI industry.
Sanders shared a summary of his legislation with AP News. If passed, the law would create a sovereign wealth fund “financed through a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of the largest AI companies,” AP News reported. Any AI firm that does $200 million in annual AI sales would be subject to the tax, as would any new firm once it reaches that revenue level.
In total, Sanders estimated the fund could be worth $7 trillion, generating “hundreds of billions of dollars annually in direct payments to Americans and programs such as health care, education and housing,” AP News reported. Each American would likely receive more than $1,000 annually in 5 percent annual dividends, Sanders estimated.
InfoWars founder Alex Jones speaks to the media outside Waterbury Superior Court during his trial on September 21, 2022. | Getty Images
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On today’s episode of Decoder, my guest is Hayden Field, senior AI reporter for The Verge. Often when Hayden comes on the show, it’s because something has gone wrong in the world of AI. Last weekend, that something was a pretty intense mix of Anthropic, the Trump administration, and Anthropic’s new AI model, Fable 5.
On Friday, not even a week since Anthropic released Fable to the public, the US government said it was imposing export controls on the new model, as well as the underlying Mythos model that Fable is based on. Those controls restricted foreign nationals, even those working for Anthropic in the United States, from accessing these models. Anthropic then took Fable and Mythos offline for everyone, because the company said it was worried it would not be able to restrict access and reasonably comply with the order otherwise.
As you might imagine, this is all a giant mess. Hayden actually just published a fantastic play-by-play on The Verge about how this all went down last Friday and the scramble through the weekend from both sides to figure out what exactly happened and how it might get resolved. So I wanted her to come on and just walk me through the timeline and what it all means.
Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here.
The situation is ongoing. As of Tuesday when we’re recording this episode, Fable is still offline — in fact, if you boot up Claude, it tells you right above the chatbox window that “Fable 5 is currently unavailable.” Yet as you’ll hear Hayden explain, whether Fable comes back online this week or not, the ripple effects of the government’s feud with Anthropic have far-reaching consequences for the tech industry and the US’s AI regulatory regime.
There’s also a big irony here, and you’ll hear Hayden and me get into that, too: Anthropic has spent years arguing that AI might soon be powerful enough to be dangerous — and that the government needed to get serious about regulating AI sooner rather than later. Well… now we’re here, and Anthropic doesn’t love the way it’s playing out.
And now, everyone — but maybe especially the Chinese government — is watching to see whether the United States’ AI regulatory approach takes the shape of a serious safety framework. Or whether it’s just another weapon for the White House to use against the companies and people that don’t bend the knee to the Trump admin. Like I said, it’s a real mess.
OK: Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field on the Claude Fable ban and the new AI regulatory landscape. Here we go.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hayden Field, you’re a senior AI reporter here at The Verge. Welcome back to Decoder.
Thanks. Great to be here.
It’s always chaos when you’re here, Hayden. That’s what I’ve come to discover.
It really is. My rule is still in effect, in that it’s always a Friday. Stuff always hits the fan on a Friday and this was no different.
Particularly when it comes to the government regulating AI, there’s a real “what if it all went crazy on Friday, so we all had to think about it over the weekend.” And then I think this has been basically true throughout the Trump administration. The scramble to put it all back together on Monday is immediate.
Yep, exactly. It’s crazy. And the fact that all these talks were happening all over the weekend and then Monday, still no resolution. I’m surprised that things aren’t resolved yet, but yeah, lots of drama.
Well, this podcast is going to come out on a Thursday. We’re recording on a Tuesday. We’ll see what happens over the next two days. But I think the big picture here of how the United States government should regulate AI and what that means for American AI companies on the world stage is open. I don’t think it’s going to be resolved with whatever happens with Fable.
Let’s try to understand the whole story and then pull those themes out of it, because they’re just going to keep coming back around again and again and again, I think with every new model released now. So, let’s start at the start. What is Claude Mythos? What is Fable? How do they relate to each other?
Great question. I asked Anthropic the same thing when they came out with this like a week ago. Because AI companies are really bad at naming things and it’s always very confusing. But the situation is that Mythos is the underlying model that is powering both Mythos 5 and Fable 5. Fable is a new model. They haven’t had Fable 1, 2, 3, or 4. They just immediately started with Fable 5, very confusing. But Fable is the watered down, or safeguarded, version of Mythos 5. When they came out with Mythos Preview in April, Anthropic kept really hyping it up. They were saying this is a potential cyber-weapon. It can never be released to the public, at least until safeguards catch up. We’re only going to release it to enterprise and governments, or “cyber defenders” is what they called them — places that need to patch up all their frameworks before bad actors come in and exploit those vulnerabilities.
Now, fast-forward to last week and Anthropic released not only Mythos 5, which is the first official Mythos — before it was Mythos Preview, so we skipped straight to 5 — then they also released on the same day Fable 5, which was the very first public version of Mythos-class models. So, same underlying framework, but now tons of safeguards built on top to hopefully stop the public from accessing this super dangerous — by Anthropic’s own admission — model that could mess up everything.
So, that’s what they released. And they spent a long time hyping this up and talking about how dangerous it was and then it kind of came back to haunt them later.
Fable is a Mythos with security guardrails. When it first came out, there was a wave of controversy, right? AI and security researchers found those guardrails were actually preventing them from doing research and seeing what Fable was capable of, because if they tried to push the boundary, it would downgrade them to Anthropic’s previous models.
Yeah. It became kind of like a meme. People were making fun of how strict the guardrails were when it came out.
So, that’s the thing that’s confusing me, where there’s a controversy because the guardrails are so strict and then something happened that made the government think Fable was so dangerous that it needed to be pulled. What happened?
I talked to some independent red teamers about this. Before the Amazon white paper was circulating, before this allegation of a jailbreak was public, I talked to some red teamers about how safe Fable 5 was. They were all pretty impressed with how the guardrails held up. I was expecting it to be a little bit easier to jailbreak. They were saying they had tried a lot of stuff and nothing was working. That’s not my experience when I usually talk to independent red teamers. They’re like, “Yeah, I got it to break here. I got it to break there.” In this case, they were saying it held up pretty well.
Now, according to a source familiar with the negotiations who was directly involved that I spoke with yesterday, this is kind of the timeline of last week. In the middle of last week, Anthropic was made aware of some research that Amazon researchers conducted. They had uncovered a potential jailbreak, something they were pretty worried about.
They sent it over to Anthropic. Anthropic was kind of going back and forth with the Amazon researchers talking about it. They were discussing whether it was really a jailbreak, or whether it was not that big of a deal essentially. Apparently, reports say that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy then got worried about it and called maybe [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent, or some member of the Trump administration, on Friday and talked about his concerns.
The Trump administration freaked out. They immediately called Anthropic. They send them a message actually and they say, “Look, you need to shut this down in 90 minutes.”
90 minutes?
Yep, 90-minute ultimatum. And they said, “We need to figure out how to fix this jailbreak that’s come to light.” Anthropic got on the phone with the Trump administration within 15 minutes of that first call and they were asking for more details. They’re like, “Okay, let’s talk about this. Are you talking about the research we’re already aware of? Are you talking about something different? What is the jailbreak you’re talking about?” They’re trying to get more details and talk to the administration.
I think the administration was also mad that Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, didn’t call back until an hour and 15 minutes after that first call. Anthropic called back 15 minutes in. It took Dario an hour and 15 minutes to call back. So, there was a lot going on here. But by the time they’re talking, the 90-minute deadline passes and the Trump administration says, “Okay, that’s it. Yep. We’re hitting you with export controls.”
That is when they told Anthropic that no foreign national can use either of these models and Anthropic has to just make sure that that is the case. No foreign national, whether they work at Anthropic or not. If you’re, say, Bank of America and you have access to Mythos 5 and you’re using it to plug vulnerabilities in your system and you’re not a US citizen, you can’t use it. Same with a random, just regular individual using Fable 5. Same with an Anthropic researcher who is not a US citizen.
So, Anthropic did the only thing it could really do in the situation and they said, “Okay, we got to sideline both these models. We can’t in like one minute figure out a way to make sure no non-US citizens are using the models.” So, that’s what happened.
I mean, it was a crazy couple of hours. Anthropic comes out with a statement later that night saying they’re trying to work with the Trump administration on this. They spent all weekend virtually meeting with administration officials and then flying three employees out — who I detail in the piece we just published — to D.C. to talk to them in person.
Notably, Dario was not there in person. He’s virtually joining all these meetings. I can confirm he was not at a wellness retreat, which is what some reports say, but they won’t tell me where he is. But he’s not at a wellness retreat. That’s all I know.
Absolutely not at a wellness retreat is Anthropic’s position. Okay.
[Laughs] So, yeah, there’s a lot going on, very dramatic. All the sources I spoke with over the past couple of days were saying the whole tech industry and the cybersecurity community in particular are just talking. One source told me, “Beijing is laughing at us right now.”
It was interesting because some cybersecurity leaders in the space came together to write a public letter and they said, “Look, not all of us believe in regulation, but if you are going to regulate it, this is not the way,” which I think is just indicative of this whole situation.
Maybe you believe in aggressive government regulation, maybe you don’t. There’s a way to operate the regulatory efforts that is rigorous and thoughtful and careful and predictable. Nothing about this seems like it was rigorous or thoughtful or predictable.
I actually want to start at the beginning. Andy Jassy and Scott Bessent might be smart guys. They obviously have very senior positions in our society. They’re not experts in AI. How did we get to Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, relaying concerns about AI security research to Scott Bessent, who does not really oversee AI policy in any meaningful way, and that resulted in a 90-minute ultimatum delivered to a company whose CEO is absent? I don’t think your politics should matter.
Either this is the worst security breach in history that the CEO of Amazon is going to call the treasury secretary, or this is just a bunch of guys who want to feel important. And I can’t quite figure out which one it is.
It’s a combination of a couple things. One, it’s the fact that, like you mentioned, a lot of these guys are not experts in AI. Any jailbreak of this is obviously serious and worth considering, but I think that it’s the type of thing that when you don’t have direct knowledge of how these systems work, you’re going to take a really black-and-white approach. These guys weren’t experts.
Andy Jassy hears about this from his own researchers. His own researchers, by the way, who had been going back and forth with Anthropic for a couple days on this. They weren’t calling the president about it. They’re like, “Okay, let’s discuss this and figure out what we can do here.” The researchers allegedly didn’t seem to think it was the end of the world. They’re just like, “Oh, we uncovered this, let’s discuss.” Anthropic was working on it and then Andy Jassy hears about it. He makes this call, everything hits the fan, which makes sense because if you are not an AI expert — and even if you are an AI expert, maybe you’re not an expert on cybersecurity and how exactly these systems work, of course — so you’re going to freak out.
It’s understandable, but what is really strange is what happened after that. Make this phone call and the administration becomes aware, okay. But what I think is really weird is the 90-minute ultimatum and not giving Anthropic additional details when they said, “Hey, let’s talk about it. Are you talking about the vulnerability we’re already aware of or are you talking about something else? And can you just tell us about it so then we can talk about it?” They said, “No, 90 minutes, do it or die.”
And then making it so that no foreign national can access the system ever. That is what’s really strange. Just the way all these cards fell is what everyone in the tech industry thinks is just really strange and it’s indicative of, as you mentioned, the way that the Trump administration has been operating with tech. A lot of times it seems to be President Trump has one conversation and he’s swayed from that most recent conversation. So he’s been very anti-regulation, very pro-American AI and wanting to advance and export American AI, which is something that the commerce department is requesting.
The Trump admin has a [request for information] out right now. They’re all about exporting American AI and advancing and beating China, but then they do this thing that kneecaps everyone with no notice and could very well impact not just Anthropic, but also OpenAI, Google, every competitor in the space that also has what they call a semi-equivalent Mythos product.
It seems really disorganized and it’s very interesting that this often ends up in a scramble with all these CEOs trying to race to kowtow to the Trump administration without really being grounded a lot of times in science or evidence that really matches what’s going on. The level of freak out is not usually matching the evidence there.
Amazon is an investor in Anthropic. They’re a major partner. Why did Andy Jassy kneecap his own investment in this way?
Well, Amazon typically does a lot of red teaming just normally. It’s just part of their process. So it makes sense that this would have been tested and then unearthed. But what’s interesting is why Andy Jassy called the Trump administration about it. I’m not sure why.
Maybe it was a typical call that was already happening and he just happened to mention something offhand. Maybe he was calling them and saying, “Yeah, good thing you did the executive order because X, Y, Z.” We don’t know. But what is interesting — and I’m glad you asked this — is that a lot of the sources I spoke with said that the stuff in the alleged jailbreak and in the Amazon white paper that’s been circulating, all of it could be achieved by OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and some other models.
That’s the allegation, that these skills are not unique to Fable 5, the skills in question as part of the jailbreak. Mythos is obviously more powerful than Fable because it doesn’t have safeguards, but when it comes to Fable and the problems that were brought to light by Amazon, it seems like those problems are not unique to Fable and that GPT-5.5 can also achieve those. A lot of people in the industry are asking, “Why Anthropic?”
A real element of this is that it’s always Anthropic. Anthropic has the most contentious relationship with the Trump administration. They were designated a supply chain risk by the Department of Defense, but the posture here is different from the usual Anthropic drama.
Historically, Anthropic has said, “We don’t want you to use our tools for X, Y, and Z.” And the Trump administration has said, “No, we get to do whatever we want with the AI tools.” That’s why Anthropic was designated supply chain risk by the Department of Defense. They said, “We have some red lines about how we want to be used in the military context.” Pete Hegseth said, “Nope, I’m going to do whatever I want. You have to allow all lawful purposes” — that’s the line — “and because you won’t, you’re a supply chain risk.” There’s now a lawsuit that’s being argued about.
Here it’s the opposite. The Trump administration is worried that the model is too powerful and can be used for too many things, and Anthropic seems to think that that belief is overblown, that the administration is overplaying a thing that they can fix. They just need the time to do it and some rigor and conversation about how effective their fix is.
How do you put that together? On the one hand, the Trump administration is anti-AI regulatory efforts. On the one hand, they say, “We get to do whatever we want with the models, make them as powerful as you can.” And then here the model is too powerful and has to be pulled before any foreign national can even look at it.
It really just speaks to the fact that the administration is trusting these companies to tell it what it should be doing. We’ve seen that a bunch with any regulation that has happened or has become voluntary. Lots of drafts have been adjusted after the Trump administration talks to AI companies. They already don’t like Anthropic. There’s already a big trust breakdown between the two from the supply chain risk situation, from the lawsuit, from drawing red lines.
I can’t imagine that this exact situation would have played out if this had been a competitor. OpenAI has a Mythos semi-equivalent model of its own. Again, no company is really saying theirs is as good as Mythos, but they say it’s pretty good. The freakout would have still happened, but I cannot imagine the rest of it would have played out the way it has. The Trump admin would have given them more time. They would have had more of a conversation and I don’t think they would have made this foreign nationals rule that has sent shockwaves through the whole industry and the world.
One of the sources I spoke with said that he already knew that backup contracts were being signed with non-US companies right now. Open weight models were being deployed on alternative hardware arrangements because now companies everywhere are saying, “Oh wow, we’ve got to make political risk part of our business plan now. We don’t really know what’s going to happen with American AI. Let’s make some backup plans here,” which is not good for the industry. It’s just interesting that the Trump administration is so afraid of China overtaking us, yet they’re willing to kneecap one of their champions, as it were, in the industry.
But I also think it’s interesting that the reasoning from the Trump administration that’s been coming out day by day seems to differ. Every day they seem to have a new excuse or part of the conversation that’s coming to light. First they say, “Oh, well, what if China had access?” A source I spoke with said that’s a rumor from a few weeks ago, from way before Fable 5 or Mythos 5 came out and that it was referencing a Chinese telecom company that the administration had previously approved to have access to Mythos Preview and that when the administration said, “Oh, actually, you know what? We changed our mind. Let’s take them off,” Anthropic immediately took them off and revoked that access. That’s an old rumor.
We’re also seeing the executive order explanation, where rumors have come to light that Anthropic wasn’t complying with the Trump administration’s executive order. Well, that executive order hasn’t gone into effect yet. He only signed it on June 2nd. It’s two weeks ago. It takes 60 days for them to figure out which models are going to be covered under it. There is a voluntary partnership with a 30-day pre-release review. It’s voluntary.
It’s funny because I’m not saying Anthropic’s totally in the right here at all. But it’s just interesting because in this situation, there’s so much misdirection and scrambling and just weirdness that it’s rare that you see me feeling bad for an AI company. It really is. I am not like, “Oh yeah, they’re doing great.” All AI companies have their own issues, but in this one case, I’m saying, “Wow, I really don’t know if this would have happened to OpenAI or another competitor, after all the drama Anthropic’s been going through with the Trump administration.”
We know the Trump admin can be petty and I think they would’ve freaked out for any company that was under this situation, but I can’t see it playing out the exact same way with a competitor.
Is it just as simple as Dario Amodei doesn’t go to the White House? He doesn’t give Trump gifts? I mean, Sam Altman does press conferences with Donald Trump. Sundar Pichai attended the inauguration.
Zuckerberg was at the UFC fight.
[Laughs] Notable AI winner Mark Zuckerberg was at the UFC fight trying to buy his way into success. Is it just as simple as there’s a personality clash here?
That’s the way it’s been perceived by some reports. That’s definitely part of it. Some reports have said Dario doesn’t know how to talk to the administration and that he doesn’t kowtow as much. He doesn’t know how to play the game. That’s part of it.
The other part of it is that the Trump administration isn’t quite sure how they’re going to regulate AI and President Trump is being pulled in different directions. Sometimes he feels like it needs to be more regulated. Sometimes he thinks it needs to be less. If he’s talking to an AI CEO, it seems like he’s like, “Yeah, you know what? I trust them. We’re good. Let them go ahead. We got to beat China.”
In other cases, he sees that the public is going through a pretty anti-AI era right now. There’s a rise in AI populism and he’s saying, “Oh, well, actually the everyman doesn’t like AI. Maybe I should regulate it.”
It’s something we’ve seen with the administration a bunch over the past however many years, but now it’s being represented in AI regulation. It’s just there’s not really a rhyme or reason right now. I don’t think that Anthropic’s communications with the administration help. If you don’t take their call the second they call, if you’re not flying to the White House to have dinner, it probably hurts your relationship a little bit in a presidency that seems to be pretty relationship-based a lot of the time.
I would contrast that with the previous administration, which was almost devoid of personality. The Biden administration, notable for a lack of personality and people, was very technocratic and very rules based in a way that I think people often thought was bloodless.
But the Biden administration did put forward an executive order that had things like transparency reviews and research requirements for the frontier models. Trump came into office, and he wiped all that out. He said, “We’re not going to regulate these companies.” And now it seems like we’re just headed back there.
If you’re going to put out an ultra-powerful model, the administration wants control of it. Certainly they will use the bluntest instrument they have in the form of export controls, but we’re going to get back to a more fine-grained, more rigorous approach to how these models are deployed and used and who gets to use them. Was it a mistake to wipe out the Biden framework? Are we headed back to that framework? Where do we think this goes now?
I could see us going back there because I interviewed a ton of people in the industry at the time, ranging across a ton of different viewpoints, and most of them believed that the Biden era executive order wasn’t quite enough. Some people thought it was a good first step and that’s why I could see us going back there because it wasn’t seen as being extremely aggressive.
If anything, it was seen as being a good first step in the direction, but really just one rung on the ladder. That’s why I could see the current administration going back there because it wasn’t that far. I will say AI companies will lobby against even that little step.
They did. They were pretty mad about it.
They did. They did deeply. But from the executive order we just saw, I could see it going back there, but a little more voluntary, which, again, all these things usually get watered down. It’s like they come out swinging and then they talk to some AI CEOs and they’re like, “Oh, okay, let’s roll it back a little bit.” So who knows, honestly.
But the reason I became an AI reporter is because I felt like there was no real regulation in the space, and this was even before ChatGPT. Journalism is a way to shine a light on what’s going on in the industry. Still, six years later, we’re not seeing a lot of regulation and any that has happened got rolled back. Maybe we’ll go back in that direction. I do see us going somewhere there, but maybe not even as much as that first rung.
It almost feels like the industry needs to push for a more considered regulatory approach, right? They need to say, “This is chaos. This can’t be how we operate. Every new model can’t be forced to contend with panicked phone calls on the weekend.”
What kind of system would you build if you wanted a more rigorous review process here? Is it that they just submit their models to the government and the government says what’s dangerous and not? Is it more industry-based? What are the solutions being proposed?
That’s a good question. There haven’t been a lot of really robust solutions proposed recently because of this current administration. They’ve had a really light touch approach to regulation so no one’s really surfacing those. Now that that might be changing, we’ll see more robust frameworks proposed.
I just hope that they’re not voluntary. AI companies already do a lot of voluntary disclosure. If you’re going to regulate, do it. There are a lot of different opinions on how light touch or heavy touch regulation should be, but I do think that voluntary frameworks are pretty watered down. You know what I mean? We already have those.
So what’s next? It’s important to remember how the general public feels because this is who AI is really affecting at the end of the day. There’s a rise in anti-AI populism and the fact that people are upset. There are data center protests going on everywhere. People are even, in extreme cases, attacking AI CEO’s homes, or at least attempting to. There is a lot of disquiet here and people feel like they’re getting replaced. They feel like their jobs are getting replaced. I was listening to a Seattle city council hearing recently and a lot of AI engineers were testifying saying that they got laid off because of AI and they were engineers.
Both AI leaders and the government often are pretty distanced from what the general public is feeling about this technology and it’s important to note. We’ll see how that impacts, if at all, regulation that comes out. I don’t have high hopes for a lot of regulation under this administration because they can be really sway-ey. They have dinner one time and then things might shift a little bit. To be fair, many politicians are that way, but we’ll see. Maybe after this executive order’s 60 days are up, we’ll see some changes that surprise me.
One of the weirder aspects of this is that Anthropic itself is the company that most pushes for regulation, that most sounds the alarm, is the most doomer-ish of all the companies. Jack Clark, one of the co-founders of Anthropic, recently put out research and his conclusion was that, “We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology.”
Anthropic is way on the front line of saying, “Oh, we might kill everyone. Boy, we should stop this.” But they’re also on the front line of model capability. By all accounts, Mythos is the most powerful model that exists today. Is Anthropic just getting itself in trouble? Is this just a marketing strategy for them that’s backfiring?
It’s a combination. The marketing speak is definitely backfiring. If you say something’s that dangerous and then a researcher unearths something that maybe wasn’t quite meant to be possible, then yeah, people are going to freak out. That’s why I can see the first thing happening to anyone. I can’t see the rest of it the way that the cards fell.
But it’s partly there, it came back to haunt them. It was a little bit on them in terms of the hype, but I also think that they are trying to be honest in some ways about the risk that this technology can pose. And it would be really bad if a system that can flag high level vulnerabilities in our global infrastructure that we use, like your bank system or a government website, could just be used by bad actors. If it fell into the wrong hands, yeah, that’s pretty bad.
It comes down to communication. It’s important to talk about the risks and not downplay them, but also if you do that and then you make a mistake or something unexpected happens, you have to deal with the consequences. There’s a lot to unpack there, for sure. I also think that a lot of companies do downplay risks of different systems. We’ve seen a bunch of AI CEOs, including Anthropic’s, talk about how jobs aren’t all going to be replaced, saying it’s going to be okay.
I always take all this stuff with a huge grain of salt. At the end of the day, whatever AI company you’re talking about, whether it’s Anthropic or another one, they all have the incentives to turn a profit and make money at all costs — especially if they become a public company, which they are about to. People like to paint Anthropic one way and other competitors another, but they’re all pursuing the same goal. They just are doing it a little bit differently.
Is there a version of this where we just treat AI like military technology from the jump, and the public gets a watered down version of the military technology? Because that seems to be the risk profile that the Trump administration is operating within. Like this is fundamentally offensive technology. We can deploy it against our enemies. We can use it to attack the banks. Everyone is worried about the security implications here.
Is there a world in which we just start there and then say, “To deploy to the public, to consumers, you have to cut this way down. We’re not going to sell F22s to the public, but we can sell Ford Raptors to the public.” There’s some version of this, right? Where the technology gets cut way down for the public with the bleeding edge just fundamentally for the military.
That’s what we’ve seen a lot for decades and it’s starting to happen now with Mythos. Fable is the watered-down version and enterprise and governments have access to the more powerful version. There are a lot of different opinions on that. One of OpenAI’s biggest marketing pushes right now is, “Oh, Anthropic wants the most powerful AI to only be in the hands of the elites and we want to bring it to the public.”
So there are a bunch of different marketing pushes right now. Everyone’s just using everything to their advantage to paint their competitors badly, Anthropic included. The race is just heating up so intensely that the AI companies at the forefront are doing anything they can to win at all costs. For some, it’s because they think that they are the best and most moral winner, which can always be a big issue as we’ve seen in every sci-fi or fantasy movie. The for-the-greater-good philosophy is typically used by the villain in the story.
There’s a big race happening right now and I totally agree with Jack Clark that it might be good to slow things down a bit. If everyone could agree — which is a huge long shot and especially it’d be very difficult to get other countries to agree as well. But we are definitely building the technology much faster than we can think about the implications of it and we have been for a long time.
I think it’s the first episode of Decoder where Dario Amodei was directly compared to Thanos, so that’s great.
[Laughs] To be fair, I was thinking about a villain from Harry Potter when I said that — Grindelwald.
Oh my gosh. All right. Well, Dario, if you want to come on and address these allegations, you’re more than welcome.
I also have to say, it’s not just Dario. All the AI CEOs are saying that, all of them. It’s crazy.
Where does this end? What are the next steps here? There are meetings happening this week. People are going to be hearing this on Thursday. There’s a chance Anthropic is just back on the market. There’s a chance it’s not. But after this, it seems like everybody wants a process. Where do you think this ends?
It’s very difficult to predict how this administration is going to act, as we saw with the supply chain risk situation. Even though a lot of government agencies were big fans of Claude, I thought that that was going to be rolled back eventually, but they just signed deals with seven other companies and said, “Okay, we’re good. Even if you guys were fans of Claude, whatever, here are seven other options for you.”
It’s anyone’s guess right now. I do think that the foreign nationals thing is going to be rolled back. I just can’t imagine that after all the hubbub that the administration has created about how American AI has to win, the Hegseth memo from January 9th arguing speed at all costs. I just think this administration is so focused on winning in AI that there’s no way they’re going to continue with that rule. I could see this becoming a personality game over the next few days. Anthropic compromises in some way, they try to communicate better. And then in a couple of days this gets rolled back.
But then I’ve seen some rumors that the Trump administration is trying to acquire a stake in Anthropic and OpenAI, an ownership stake. So there could be a lot of different “resolutions” to that here. We’ll see, but I definitely can’t foresee this as it exists right now continuing for more than a couple of days. The industry is just aghast at this situation.
Hayden, we’re going to obviously have to have you back very soon as this comes to a close. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.
Thanks so much.
Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!
In recent years, the global landscape of cannabis policy has undergone significant transformations, stirring complex debates about the implications of legalization, decriminalization, and commercial sales on public health and societal well-being. A comprehensive study published in The Lancet Psychiatry on June 17, 2026, provides the most extensive analysis to date of international cannabis policies and their associations with cannabis use, cannabis use disorder, and other psychiatric outcomes. Led by an interdisciplinary team spearheaded by experts from the University of Bath in the UK, this systematic review draws on a wealth of data spanning across continents including the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia, elucidating the nuanced consequences of various regulatory approaches to cannabis.
The study underscores a critical distinction between policy frameworks that decriminalize or tightly regulate cannabis and those that permit large-scale commercial sales. Decriminalization typically involves removing criminal penalties for personal possession while maintaining restrictions on production and distribution. The data shows that such approaches do not generally lead to an uptick in cannabis consumption. Conversely, jurisdictions that have embraced fully commercialized cannabis markets—with broad retail availability and significant profit-driven incentives, such as many US states and Canada—experience higher consumption rates. These markets tend to propel an increase not just in use, but also in cannabis potency and the prevalence of addiction, revealing troubling public health ramifications hitherto underestimated.
Uruguay’s pioneering legalization model exemplifies a tightly regulated framework. Since its inception, Uruguay has implemented strict controls, limiting cannabis products’ availability and potency, distributing through pharmacy networks, cannabis social clubs, and permitting personal cultivation under strict rules. This structure, focused on harm minimization rather than commercial proliferation, correlates with relatively stable cannabis use rates. Such regulatory restraint contrasts sharply with the dynamics in North America, where deregulation has coincided with escalating rates of daily cannabis consumption and a worrying rise in addiction rates. Notably, in the US, the number of daily cannabis consumers now surpasses daily alcohol consumers, a landmark shift underlining the profound public health challenges precipitated by commercial legalization.
The study identifies the expansion of the for-profit cannabis industry as a pivotal factor in increasing health risks. Mirroring patterns observed historically with tobacco and alcohol industries, large-scale cannabis corporations emphasize product innovation, marketing, and aggressive sales strategies. This has catalyzed the availability of increasingly potent cannabis products, which significantly elevates the risk of dependence and the likelihood of adverse psychiatric outcomes, including psychotic disorders. Furthermore, the surge in hospital admissions due to cannabis-related psychosis in regions with commercial cannabis markets casts a serious shadow over the narrative that legalization inherently reduces harm.
In contrast, decriminalization policies appear to offer a more balanced approach, mitigating the harms associated with criminal prosecution—especially in marginalized communities disproportionately affected by enforcement—while not necessarily increasing use. The researchers highlight this as a crucial insight with implications for evolving policy debates, such as those unfolding in the United Kingdom. Here, cannabis remains a Class B controlled substance with severe penalties, although prominent calls for reform, like the 2025 London Drugs Commission report, advocate for shifting possession offenses away from the criminal justice system toward healthcare frameworks, aiming to reduce social and racial inequities.
Medical cannabis, a rapidly expanding sector, emerged as another focal concern within the study. Regulations remain highly inconsistent globally, and often poorly governed, raising critical questions about safety and therapeutic efficacy. The evidence base, as reviewed in the study, remains inconclusive or limited for many medical indications, especially psychiatric disorders. Despite increasing prescriptions of cannabinoids to treat conditions such as insomnia, autism traits, or substance use disorders, outcomes from randomized clinical trials suggest only modest benefits and lack robust evidence to support claims for efficacy in anxiety, PTSD, depression, or psychosis management. Moreover, unregulated medical cannabis access may inadvertently increase risks of harm due to insufficient clinical oversight and dosage control.
A significant aspect of the analysis relates to cannabis’ psychiatric implications beyond addiction. While daily use has been found to synergistically interact with other risk factors to elevate psychosis risk, the associations with depression, anxiety, and suicidality remain equivocal and warrant further investigation. This nuanced understanding challenges oversimplified narratives around cannabis as either categorically harmful or benign and underscores the critical need for targeted, evidence-based public health interventions.
Professor Tom Freeman, lead author from the University of Bath’s Department of Psychology, emphasizes the decisive role of policy modality over the mere presence of policy changes. He asserts that decriminalization or strict legal regulation can disentangle the harms of criminalization from those stemming from increased cannabis availability and potency. By contrast, commercialized legalization prioritizes market expansion, often at the expense of public health safeguards, exacerbating addiction, and psychiatric morbidity.
The research team also notes a geographical research gap, as much existing evidence centers on North America. They advocate for expanded studies in diverse contexts to fully capture the global ramifications of shifting cannabis policies. Such comprehensive surveillance is vital as an increasing number of countries contemplate or implement reforms, thus influencing future public health trajectories internationally.
The robustness of the conclusions stems from the study’s systematic review methodology, synthesizing findings from numerous epidemiological investigations, clinical trials, and policy analyses. This integrative approach provides a panoramic yet detailed picture of cannabis policy consequences, supporting evidence-based policymaking in a politically charged and rapidly evolving arena.
As cannabis policies continue to evolve worldwide, this landmark study serves as a clarion call for caution, nuanced regulation, and rigorous scientific evaluation. In balancing decriminalization and legal regulation against the risks posed by unbridled commercial markets, policymakers face complex trade-offs with profound implications for population health and social justice.
Subject of Research: Cannabis policies and their effects on cannabis use, addiction, and psychiatric disorders in human populations.
Article Title: International cannabis policies and their association with cannabis use, cannabis use disorder, and other psychiatric disorders published in The Lancet Psychiatry
California state regulators say AT&T lied to the Federal Communications Commission in an attempt to shut off its old copper phone network without providing an adequate replacement.
"AT&T asserts that California seeks to prohibit or hinder wireline carriers from discontinuing copper facilities and investing in fiber," said a June 15 filing by the state of California and the California Public Utilities Commission. "Indeed, AT&T has been making this argument for years. It is not and has never been true."
As we reported last month, AT&T sued California over the state’s refusal to let it stop providing phone service to all potential customers in its wireline network territory. AT&T also petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to declare that California cannot enforce its rules and to let AT&T stop providing service to about 199,000 phone customers.
A new FTC lawsuit reveals how sophisticated subscription app operators can allegedly use shell companies and payment infrastructure to stay active on app stores despite mounting consumer complaints.
French President Macron and Indian PM Modi raised alarms at the G7 summit that the U.S. could cut off access to American AI overnight — a fear the Anthropic blackout just made real.
Anthropic has spent much of this week fighting to get its newest AI models back online after the Trump administration abruptly ordered the company to cut access for all foreign nationals, including users inside the US and its own employees, forcing Anthropic to block access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for everyone.
"To my knowledge, this is the first time US export controls have been used to control access to an AI model in this way."
The Trump administration has not publicly explained the legal basis for the order, but in a statement on its website, Anthropic said the government cited "national security authorities" to justify "an export con …
CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei attends a working lunch with G7 leaders, G7 outreach partners, and global tech CEOs on innovation and AI, during the G7 Summit on June 17th, 2026, in Evian-les-Bains, France. | Photo: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images
Hello and welcome to Regulator, an email for Verge subscribers about technology, politics, and what happens when science crashes headlong into self-interest. Not a subscriber? Sign up here today! Got the scoop on a petty feud that's going to somehow fundamentally reshape the entire field of frontier AI development? Send 'em over to tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com.
Back when I was covering Donald Trump's first presidency, it was incredibly common to read three different versions of the same story. His administration had split into several factions, all of which had different interests, and all of which hated each other. There was the Reince Pr …
The Trump administration is trying to help Elon Musk's xAI Corp. beat a Clean Air Act lawsuit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The US said the NAACP lawsuit threatens an xAI data center that powers Grok systems needed by the military.
The NAACP sued xAI and subsidiary MZX Tech in April, alleging that they violated the Clean Air Act by operating 27 gas turbines without an air permit in Southaven, Mississippi. The number of unpermitted turbines rose to 57 by mid-May and there were plans to install two more, the NAACP said in a June 12 filing.
"Defendants’ Colossus Gas Plant powers xAI’s nearby Colossus 2 data center, which in turn powers the chatbot 'Grok,'" the lawsuit said. The gas turbines have fueled both health concerns and noise complaints.
When the US Department of Justice approved Paramount Skydance's proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on Friday, a DOJ press release said "a rigorous eight-month investigation led by the [Antitrust] Division’s career staff" showed that the $111 billion deal would not harm competition or American consumers.
But according to The Wall Street Journal, the DOJ career lawyers who led that investigation "were leaning toward recommending a lawsuit challenging it on the grounds that the combination of the two movie studios would be anticompetitive and violate antitrust law." DOJ senior leaders closed the investigation "before career staffers who were concerned about the acquisition had an opportunity to object, according to people familiar with the matter," the WSJ reported.
Commenting on the report that the decision to allow the deal surprised staff investigators, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote that "the American people need to know if this merger was approved as a political favor. This reeks of corruption."
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