Big AI vs. Big Government in the 21st Century

Ross Douthat, The Battle With Anthropic Is the Start of a New Kind of Conflict, NYTimes, June 16, 2026.

The nature of the Anthropic conflict can be swiftly summarized even if the details are in dispute. Two months ago the company declined to publicly release its latest model, Mythos, citing various safety concerns (and hyping the model’s revolutionary power). After previewing Mythos to the U.S. government and certain corporate actors, Anthropic then released Fable, a version of the model with various safety guardrails. Amazon, an Anthropic investor and client, discovered a way to bypass some of those guardrails. This was reported to the White House, Anthropic’s response was deemed unsatisfactory, and the administration used its export-control power to forbid the use of Fable by any foreign national inside the United States and anybody at all outside it — a rule that Anthropic treated as a requirement to shut the new A.I. model down.

That’s where we are now, with the company and the administration negotiating over how to bring back Fable while ongoing leaks to the press paint one or the other side as unreasonable or reckless or ideological and clueless about tech.

Two facets of the conflict:

But beyond the specifics of why, say, the libertarian tech people in the Trump administration distrust the effective-altruist tech people running Anthropic, the kind of conflict we’re seeing here is overdetermined by the trajectory of the A.I. models: There is too much potential power here not to have ongoing, escalating struggles over who actually gets to rule.

The war over Fable previews the two broad forms that this conflict will take. First there is a private-public struggle, where governments grope for a regulatory sweet spot that allows them to maintain a meaningful veto over the A.I. behemoths without killing off their innovative power, while the A.I. companies try to maintain control over their own models and influence over how governments use their innovations.

There is a path here that leads to nationalization in all but name and a path that leads to a kind of de facto corporate takeover of the government, or at least a too-big-to-fail symbiosis. And along the way there may be not just conflicts between presidents and A.I. executives but also increasingly ruthless corporation-on-corporation action, out of fear that the A.I. landscape is winner-take-all to an extent we’ve never seen in capitalism before. [...]

Then alongside the struggle to control A.I. power within American borders, there is the geopolitical struggle to maximize global power (where the only real players are probably the United States and China) and maintain sovereignty (where everyone else is likely to be scrambling to maintain some independence). The use of export controls to shut down Fable presumably reflected U.S. fears of Chinese access to a jailbroken version of the model, but it was also a warning to every other country in the world: If we end up with economy-permeating A.I. models that are made and regulated in America, the American government will control the on-off switch.

There's more at the link.