Here in muggy Washington, DC, everyone is fighting. On Sunday, in celebration of President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, UFC champions duked it out on the White House lawn. The tickets went to a who’s who of tech: Mark Zuckerberg, David Ellison, and Ben Horowitz all had prime seats.
These moguls may have been watching one fight, but I bet they were gossiping about another. Last week Anthropic released a new model, Fable, its most powerful large language model yet. The company claims it has guardrails to prevent it from being used for malicious hacks, but Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, whose company is invested in Anthropic, wasn’t so sure. He reportedly told the White House that Amazon researchers found a way to evade Fable’s safety limits.
By the end of Friday, Trump had slapped export controls on the company and Anthropic had disabled the model. The move has my tech sources reeling. Might it be a sign of conservative support for nationalizing AI companies? Was Fable really that dangerous? Or are AI-powered hacks of government infrastructure inevitable?
At least on the last question, fear not. An unlikely group is here to keep us safe: the DOGE boys. My colleague Sylvia Varnham O’Regan and I reported that DOGE’s main characters recently discovered a classic Washington tradition: the revolving door. The young men have left their posts in government, soliciting DOGE’s billionaire overlords to back an AI company aimed at protecting government systems from cyberattacks.
I’m Margaux MacColl, filling in for Julia Black. Read on for my piece on DOGE’s second act.
Mentioned in this issue: Anthropic, Keir Starmer, Snapchat, Sam Bankman-Fried, Timothée Chalamet, Kalshi, Charlie Javice, JPMorgan, Lachlan Murdoch, Fox Corporation, Roku, Becca Bloom, Gavin Kliger, Marc Andreessen, Luke Farritor, Elon Musk
