President Donald Trump told Axios in a pretaped White House interview that Anthropic has “behaved very responsibly” and that he no longer considers the company a national security threat. Asked whether he still viewed Anthropic or its chief executive Dario Amodei as a threat, Trump answered: “Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe.”

The legal apparatus telling a different story is still operational. The Commerce Department’s June 12 order barring foreign nationals from using Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models hasn’t been rescinded. The Pentagon’s March supply-chain risk designation, imposed after Anthropic refused to strip guardrails on surveillance and autonomous-weapons use cases, also remains in place.

The interview aired two days after Trump and Amodei sat in the same room at a closed-door G7 roundtable in Évian-les-Bains, alongside Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind. Seated beside French President Emmanuel Macron, Amodei urged the table to “resist the temptation to splinter” on AI regulation, and pitched a United States–led coalition on frontier-model access, chip trade that excludes China, and cooperation against cyber and bioterrorism risk.

That pitch lands awkwardly against the chain of events Fortune reconstructed last week. According to that account, the June 12 crackdown was triggered by a phone call from Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, after Amazon researchers used a prompt sequence to extract restricted cyberattack information from a Mythos-class model. Commerce gave Anthropic 90 minutes before the controls took effect.

The legal scaffolding is the 2018 Export Control Reform Act, which a former senior Commerce official told Bloomberg was written for physical goods and software code and may not formally cover cloud or chatbot access at all. Trump, asked about invoking the Defense Production Act, said: “I have the power to use a lot of things. But I’m not sure I have to do that.”

The financial stakes explain the diplomatic choreography. Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H-1 in late May at a $965 billion post-money valuation, and filed its S-1 confidentially on June 1, targeting an October 2026 Nasdaq listing expected to raise more than $60 billion. A live national-security designation isn’t a thing you carry into a roadshow.

Anthropic, in a statement to Axios: “We are grateful to the administration for their ongoing partnership in working to get this matter resolved as quickly as possible.”

Trump also said the United States was beating China on AI “by a lot.” Two orders are still binding. One president says they shouldn’t be. The pre-IPO window narrows either way.

Sources