U.S. President Donald Trump said he does not believe Anthropic PBC poses a national security threat. The move comes days after the Trump administration took steps to cut off foreign access to the tech company's most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models.
In a taped interview released by Axios on Friday, Trump said he thought Anthropic "acted very responsibly." Previously, the U.S. Commerce Department required the company, led by CEO Dario Amodei, to seek prior U.S. government approval before allowing foreign nationals to use its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models.
"He responded to us very quickly because, you know, there's a huge responsibility involved," Trump said. He also said he met with Amodei and other technology executives at the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France, on Wednesday.
Asked if he believed Anthropic and Amodei posed a national security threat, Trump said, "Well, not now. But a week ago, maybe they were."
The order issued by the U.S. Commerce Department to Anthropic last week marks the most significant interference by the U.S. government in the operations of an AI company to date. The directive poses new challenges for Anthropic, which confidentially filed for an initial public offering weeks ago and was last valued at more than $900 billion.
Anthropic's top technical staff met with Trump administration officials this week to try to assuage the administration's concerns.
Trump says he won't shut down Anthropic. "I would do that, but I'm not sure I have to. I think it's been very responsible so far," he said in the interview.