For our free newsletter this week, we write about how governments have an interest in investing directly in AI. 
@IrenaCronin and I write this newsletter every week.   AI is becoming an investment race as governments seek more influence over the companies and infrastructure shaping the future economy. The U.S. is debating whether the public should have a stake in major AI companies, while the U.K. and South Korea are already investing directly in AI infrastructure, computing capacity, and chips to strengthen their national competitiveness. Read and subscribe for free: unaligned.io

Maybe we shouldn't just be scared of China.

Follow robot, It may look like a loyal little robot dog carrying your stuff and following you around, but it's actually an industrial-grade logistics transport robot.

In the several days I've had Siri AI, it has blown away my expectations. It has handled every task and question I've given it, even complex multi-step ones across Photos, Notes, Calendar, and context from my Safari web history. Apple is redeeming itself.

At Claude Build day several builders made the same point to me. Well we have gotten the AI slowdown lots wanted. Until the Chinese do it. American companies are handcuffed. For now.

In San Francisco and met @simulatedLiam. His system cloned my voice in a few seconds. His service does this so you can talk to yourself about what is going on in your day. A mini me. We talk about what it means and get a demo. You can try it at everlife.one He said doing this wasn’t possible a few months ago. Mine sounds just like me. Uncannily like me. Voice tech is getting nuts.

The builders still showed up for Anthropic.

"The ball is in Anthropic’s court."

I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true: — As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable. — Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.) — A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused. — In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.” — In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety. — In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community. — The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority. — Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.

Not a single AI investor has spoken out publicly in support of Anthropic. My AI that also does alignednews.com/ai reads them all: Good question — here's what the AI Investors list actually shows. The short answer: no prominent investor is publicly defending Dario. The investor community reaction ranges from measured silence to direct criticism. Here's the breakdown: 🔴 CRITICAL / NEGATIVE TOWARD DARIO @arian_ghashghai (investor) — 26 likes, June 11 (before the shutdown): "imo its comical that it's virtually consensus at this point that the people running Anthropic (and OpenAI, for that matter) suck, while also being consensus that we should ape all of our savings into their stock. not really sure what that says about allocators" @stevesi (Steve Sinofsky, former Microsoft Windows President, investor) — June 5: "Anthropic could always stop if they are so worried." This one is devastating. 11 likes but from a deeply credible source — a sharp jab at the safety theater argument. @DavidSacks (David Sacks, Trump's AI Czar, investor) — March 28: RT'd: "Anthropic may pose as this company that's on the side of the angels, but they've hired a number of very s[uspicious people]..." Sacks has been hostile to Anthropic for months. He's also the person most likely to have been involved in the directive. His prior criticisms age in a particular way now. @alexanderbittan (investor) — May 1: "Wild that Anthropic is the only major frontier lab not on the new DoW stack while literally everyone else OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, SpaceX, Reflection just locked in classified deployments. This is what it looks like when leadership completely misreads the [room]" 🟡 NOTABLY SILENT / MEASURED @htaneja (Hemant Taneja, General Catalyst CEO) — General Catalyst is a major Anthropic investor. His statement on Anthropic vs. Pentagon, April 21: "I cannot say the perspectives on either side were wrong. I think you need a culture where you can actually have conversations and create productive outcomes as opposed to taking very binary positions." This is not a defense of Dario. From the CEO of a major Anthropic investor, right when it mattered, that measured non-answer is significant. @YasminRazavi (Spark Capital) — led Anthropic's $450M round when nobody else would. No public reaction found to the shutdown. Silent. @bdeeter (Byron Deeter, Bessemer Venture Partners): Pre-shutdown positive: "We have not seen a company like this in the history of business." — But nothing since the shutdown. 🔵 WILD CARD: THE COST THEORY @aviflombaum (in the AI Investors list, June 13): "I think the real reason @AnthropicAI stopped access to Fable 5 is because @kieranklaassen told me today at @blastoffrails that if he extrapolated his Fable 5 usage in the last week to API pricing for a year it would be $1,500,000." This investor thinks the government story is a cover — the real reason is that Fable was too expensive to keep running for heavy users. $1.5M/year per power user makes the model economically unviable without massive pricing restructuring. The export control directive may have been welcomed as a convenient exit ramp. BOTTOM LINE No prominent AI investor has publicly defended Dario since the shutdown. The investor voices that have spoken are either critical of his leadership strategy, neutral, or offering business-case explanations that bypass the safety framing entirely. The General Catalyst CEO's measured non-defense from an Anthropic investor is perhaps the most telling data point — when your own investors don't come out swinging for you, the silence has a shape. The closest thing to investor support: Yasmin Razavi and Byron Deeter had pre-shutdown positive statements, but neither has commented on the directive itself.

On way to Claude Build Day in San Francisco. Meanwhile my AI read everything on X and wrote a massive wrap up of @AnthropicAI vs US Government: alignednews.com/ai If Fable reappears (and I assume it will eventually) it sure got the best marketing ever, as many have pointed out. Who doesn't want to use a model so powerful that it was banned by the US government? It sure is one way to get everyone to forget that the AI industry was bashing Anthropic most of the week for nerfing the model badly. It makes me sad for the competition with the Chinese. OpenSource models (and the Chinese mostly have the best) are now a lot more attractive too. Businesses hate when they get shut down in the middle of working.

SpaceX president @Gwynne_Shotwell reveals over half of all 22,000 employees bought an extra $1,000,000,000 of stock in their own IPO "We're about 22,000 strong. I'm super proud that over half of us actually bought additional stock in this opening, totalling a billion dollars" "The thank-you go to all of you for hanging in there, for keeping a straight spine as the doubters doubt, to achieve historic things every day"

contrary to the default reaction on this little website, this is absolutely incredible news for anthropic. i mean obviously yes, the operational disruption is real. but public & world perception wise, this could not be a bigger home run. could be a grand slam type situation. the fucking united states govt just looked at their model & effectively said.. yeah this shit is too powerful. you simply cannot buy that kind of aura. it elevates every other product by the company & it instantly reframes anthropic’s work as strategically significant, nationally relevant, & qualitatively different from the rest of the field. there is not a single institution on the planet that can buy or orchestrate this type of significance. absolutely ridiculous.

How can Anthropic’s IPO proceed in this environment?

Tonight’s show reminds once again why this is the number one podcast.

I can’t see how @DarioAmodei survives another week. Investors in @AnthropicAI are pissed at his leadership.