Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent Anthropic chief compute officer Tom Brown a June 26 letter authorizing access to the Claude Mythos 5 model for trusted partners, partially reversing the June 12 export directive, per TechCrunch. More than 100 U.S. companies and federal agencies, plus their non-American employees and Anthropic's own non-American employees, can now use Mythos 5, with many drawn from Anthropic's roughly 100-company Project Glasswing roster. Fable 5, the public facing Mythos-class model, remains offline with no announced timeline for restoration. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression's John Coleman said "no one knows how these companies are picked and why everyone else is excluded," and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X that he did not like "the idea of the government picking the customers."
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An overwhelming majority of likely voters want advanced AI systems to undergo mandatory safety reviews before public release — going further than the Trump administration's current opt-in policy — according to a new survey from the AI Policy Institute (AIPI) reported by NBC News. Republicans were more enthusiastic about government-led safety testing than Democrats, though more than half of voters backed it regardless of party. Among the 1,007 likely voters surveyed June 10 and 11, two-thirds preferred AI with guardrails over an outright ban, more than 60% of both Republicans and Democrats said the federal government — not AI companies — should set safety standards, and more than 80% said companies shouldn't build smarter-than-human systems until they can prove they control them. "I think people in the White House who have been trying to push a no-rules-whatsoever perspective are out of step with the American people," said Peter Wildeford, director of policy at the AI Policy Network.
Read at NBC News ↗ • Read at AI Policy Institute ↗
President Donald Trump on Friday threatened a 100% tariff on imports from any country that imposes a tax on digital services from U.S. companies, in a Truth Social post that singled out European nations he said were close to implementing such levies. Trump said the tariff would supersede previously negotiated trade deals and would be imposed immediately if a country proceeded with a digital services tax. European Commission spokesperson Olof Gill said the EU would respond decisively to defend its regulatory autonomy if Washington pursued the threat. Roughly half of Europe's OECD members have proposed, announced or already implemented a digital services tax, according to the Tax Foundation, with such taxes designed to capture revenue from large U.S. technology companies that operate in their economies without a local taxable presence, per CBS News. The post landed eight days before Trump's July 4 deadline for finalizing U.S.-EU implementation of the May trade deal capping most EU tariffs at 15%, which left digital taxes unresolved.
Read at The Washington Post ↗ • Read at CBS News ↗ • Read at FT ↗
Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for permission to source memory chips from ChangXin Memory Technologies, the Chinese supplier on the Pentagon's Section 1260H Chinese Military Companies list, per the Financial Times. The iPhone maker has approached the White House, the Commerce Department and other administration officials seeking assurances that purchases would not trigger future restrictions, citing pressure from rising DRAM and NAND prices driven by AI related demand. CXMT is China's largest memory chipmaker and has been approved for addition to the Commerce Department's Entity List. U.S. exports of goods, software and technology to listed firms generally require a license that is typically denied. Apple recently raised iPad and MacBook prices by 20%, with CEO Tim Cook calling the memory cost jump unlike anything he had seen in over 40 years.
Read at FT ↗ • Read at CNBC ↗