Anthropic is closing out one of the most consequential months in its history, capped off by a fresh showdown with the Trump administration that, paradoxically, may end up boosting the AI lab. According to Ramp's business-spending data, Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in market share for the first time at the end of May, then closed a $65 billion funding round at a $965 billion valuation — figures that also edged out its chief rival. The company also filed confidential paperwork for an IPO, reportedly fueled by its first profitable quarter.
The trouble began on Friday when the Trump administration sent Anthropic a letter invoking an obscure export control directive, demanding that the company block non-Americans — including its own employees — from accessing its most advanced models, the limited-release Mythos 5 and the publicly available Fable 5, which launched just three days earlier. The order effectively forced Anthropic to pull the model from the market entirely. The administration's exact motivation is unclear, but chatter suggests hackers bypassed the guardrails on Fable 5, which were designed to shield the public from Mythos 5's more dangerous capabilities — particularly its ability to identify software vulnerabilities, a feature Anthropic itself flagged as risky enough to restrict.
This latest clash follows Anthropic's earlier refusal to let the government deploy its models for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons. In March, the Trump administration retaliated by labeling the company a supply-chain risk. Rather than scaring off customers, that move appears to have done the opposite. According to Ara Kharazian, Ramp's lead economist, Anthropic's best month on record for business adoption was the very month the Department of Defense designated it a supply-chain risk. "If anything, it'll probably boost them," Kharazian told TechCrunch. "There's a lot of aura that comes with your model specifically being named too dangerous to use."