The company Trump can't ignore

 On the evening of April 6, an unusual request began making its way from Washington to some of Wall Street’s most powerful executives. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wanted to see them first thing the next morning.

The heads of Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo had already been in Washington for a routine meeting of the Financial Services Forum, a trade association whose gatherings are usually free of drama. But as the bankers wound down their day over dinner and drinks, that quickly changed.

Bessent had learned that the artificial intelligence company Anthropic had developed a new model, called Mythos, which would be released the next day to approved users in the public and private sector, a limited rollout that Anthropic said was the safest way to release its most capable model yet. Treasury secretaries do not typically occupy themselves with Silicon Valley product releases, but the growing capabilities of AI presented a unique threat to the American economy.

Anthropic had briefed the government on the advanced model, which was capable of finding holes in digital infrastructure at lightning speed — a skill that could be used for defense in the right hands, or to wreak havoc in the wrong ones. In late March, Microsoft had privately warned administration officials after receiving early access to Mythos that it represented a significant leap and could automate sophisticated cyberattacks against financial institutions, the energy grid and other critical infrastructure, allowing less skilled actors to carry out operations once limited to elite hackers.

The White House spun into crisis mode. In the Situation Room, Cabinet secretaries met with the administration’s top science adviser to understand Mythos’ capabilities and brainstorm how their agencies could respond. Afterwards Vice President JD Vance convened a phone call with some of the country's most influential technology executives, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his leading competitors. Vance conveyed that the administration wanted a partnership in addressing frontier AI that supported innovation while balancing security concerns.

“We know today's hot button thing is Mythos, but we know that's not going to be the last one,” an administration official involved in the discussions said, describing the call.

That engagement represented a turnabout for a president who had returned to office banking on continued expansion of the American artificial intelligence sector to drive the country’s economic growth. As his AI czar, President Donald Trump chose David Sacks, a cheerleader for a hands-off approach that viewed any new regulations as a geopolitical risk in what the White House called an “AI race” against Chinese industry.

The emergence of Mythos challenged those assumptions, forcing the Trump administration to reimagine AI models not only as trophies of Silicon Valley innovation but also as loaded weapons that could be aimed at critical parts of the American economy. As Bessent informed the financial industry, models like Mythos could democratize the once-scarce skill of hacking so that anyone could deploy it at enormous scale. At the Treasury Department early that Monday morning, Bessent laid out the worst-case scenario: a layperson able to crack the security of banks, power grids, telecommunications networks and government systems — targets that once required teams of highly skilled hackers to penetrate.

Over the following weeks, the administration would be forced to grapple with deeply unsettling questions in one of the fiercest policy fights of Trump’s presidency. When do privately developed models present enough of a public risk that they need to be reined in? How does one determine whether those systems are safe enough to deploy? And where in the machinery of a federal government developed long before the computer, let alone artificial intelligence, should that power reside?

The unlikely private sector partner for those deliberations was Anthropic, which had long promoted itself as a socially responsible alternative to other Silicon Valley companies’ breakneck pursuit of progress. By early 2026, the company was clashing with the Pentagon over how its models could be used by the military. After Amodei published a lengthy essay last week calling for a slowdown in American AI innovation, top rivals, including OpenAI, acknowledged the need to do more to address safety concerns. But Trump has refused to involve his government.

“The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” the president wrote amid last week’s rising concern about AI’s risk to humanity. “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ - and we will continue to do so!”

That enmity stems directly from the moment of Mythos’ release, as Trump was first forced to confront AI in full — a creator of problems as well as a solver of them — and its flagship companies as holders of rare leverage against him. Over a premonitory 85-day period, two of the most powerful forces in American life each confronted the limits of their might. The White House and Anthropic found their way to an agreement over the first Trump-era federal rules around the development of AI, just to find it rendered obsolete by the release of the next model.

“The United States leads the world in AI innovation, and President Trump will keep it that way,” said White House spokesperson Liz Huston. “The Trump Administration is committed to unleashing American innovation, supporting the safe and successful deployment of the world’s most advanced AI models, and protecting our national security.”

Anthropic declined to comment for this article, but directed POLITICO Magazine to a series of blog posts it published about Mythos and the administration’s later actions to restrict it..

Interviews with more than a dozen participants in those negotiations — including top figures in both the federal government and tech sector, granted anonymity to candidly recount them, along with contemporaneous documentation of their exchanges — reveal a presidency discovering the fearsome computing power being assembled by private companies on its watch, and learning that no policymaking process will ever be able to keep up with the rate of technological change.