Opinion | What the Fight With Anthropic Reveals About Free Speech in America

The rollout of artificial intelligence technologies has landed at the worst possible time for humanity. (Well, the second-worst time; everyone having hallucinating robot friends during Covid would have probably been far worse.) At the same time, I’m a technologist who loves playing with all the new toys. So I was torn these past couple of weeks during the release and withdrawal of a powerful new Anthropic model, and the subsequent row between the Trump administration and the A.I. company.

On June 9, Anthropic publicly released Claude Fable 5, a more powerful model than its predecessors that was particularly good at writing and debugging computer code. After a few days, the Trump administration banned the model for any non-U.S. citizens, citing safety concerns.

Anthropic, lacking the ability to discern nationality among its users — and having been reportedly given only 90 minutes to comply with the administration’s order — pulled access for everyone. The government eventually lifted its restrictions, saying it was satisfied with steps Anthropic had taken to detect and address safety risks. By July 1, Fable was back online.

I am pro-A.I. regulation. So when I first heard that the Trump administration was cracking down on Anthropic, I thought: Even if this is happening in the most chaotic, least transparent way possible, perhaps it’s pointing in the right direction.

But over the Fable-less weeks, I found myself getting increasingly angry, not simply because I couldn’t gain access to the model I had paid to use, but also because it felt as if people were being censored, rather than protected. It agitated the same part of my brain that believes, quite deeply, in free speech.

And so what I’ve realized is that responsible A.I. governance may really come down to something resembling a First Amendment approach.