We set out to reconstruct the 85 days that changed America’s AI policy

Here’s a scene from the day export controls came down:

- In a call with Cairncross and Bessent, Amodei offered to tutor Bessent on the mechanics of AI guardrails.
- The vulnerabilities being reported by Amazon, he said, were consistent with what the company had expected before launch. They were fundamentally different, Amodei went on, from the kind of universal jailbreak that would render a model's safeguards ineffective or make Fable any less safe than models already on the market.
- Amodei: “Would it be helpful for you to go into a little detail? I think we need to keep risks in perspective.
- Bessent: “Well, I don't think that's really necessary, Dario. Because we and some [of] the industry people have concluded that this can't be generally released at present.”
- Amodei tried again. He urged Bessent to let him explain how Anthropic thought about jailbreaks and why the company believed the risks remained within the range it had previously described to the gov. Perfect guardrails did not exist, he argued. That was true for Anthropic and, he believed, true for every frontier AI developer.
- Amodei: “This was our expectation when launching the model. Nothing surprising or unexpected from our perspective has occurred.” 
- Bessent wasn't persuaded. From his perspective, the debate over technical definitions missed the point. The admin had believed Anthropic's representations about Fable’s safety. -Whether they were universal or non-universal jailbreaks mattered less than the fact that they had appeared — within days of release.
“It’s not really helping your case when you're saying everything it does was expected,” Bessent told Amodei. 
- Amodei tried to universalize the stakes, letting the admin know its approach would not only cripple a company it saw as an antagonist but an entire industry it claimed to champion.
- “I think any decision to de-deploy Fable would basically set a precedent that models above a certain level of capability cannot be deployed commercially at all,” Amodei said.
- Cairncross cut him off. “The concern with a general population release of this model is presenting to our national security systems, as I’ve said, a threat that we are not at this point ready to absorb. To protect the United States of America, we need Fable access to be removed.”
- “Gentlemen, I’ve got to go,” said Cairncross, noting he had another meeting to attend. “Dario, what I need from you is: Anthropic, will you be closing off access to Fable or not?”
- Amodei said he could not shut Fable down just an hour after first hearing the gov’s concerns. His engineers were still trying to understand what had happened and he was not prepared to cut access to a product used by customers around the world
- Cairncross: “I have the answer I need.”
Bessent was even more direct. "That is a bad decision.”

Story w/ @cheyennehaslett
Edited by @sissenberg

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/09/20/anthropic-white-house-ai-01085212