Did Anthropic talk its way into an AI export ban?

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Anthropic has warned about the dangers of advanced AI far more often than rival OpenAI this year, according to FT analysis, as critics accuse the company of helping to trigger a US ban on foreign access to its newest models.

Five in every 1,000 words used by Anthropic in 2026 related to risk, regulation or restrictions, according to FT research that analysed official statements, social media posts and articles written by the company or its chief Dario Amodei. The equivalent figure for OpenAI and Sam Altman was eight times lower at 0.6 words per 1,000.

The comparison has become politically charged after Washington last week barred foreign nationals from using Anthropic’s latest models, Mythos and Fable. Some technologists have blamed the decision on the $965bn AI group’s repeated warnings about AI’s risk to society — particularly in relation to Mythos.

Yann LeCun, Meta’s former chief AI scientist and one of AI’s pioneers, said this week the export ban showed that Amodei’s “ridiculous fear-mongering” about AI had finally paid off. “One reaps what one sows,” he wrote in a social media post a week ago.

The dispute has alarmed parts of Europe and Silicon Valley, where executives and officials fear the Trump administration may be willing to restrict non-US access to frontier models. It is emerging as an early test of how the US intends to oversee increasingly powerful AI models.

The FT created lists of terms including “harmful”, “dangerous” and “misaligned” and calculated how frequently they appeared in statements by each company or its CEO. It also used sentiment analysis to compare the positive and negative tone of communications.

The research found that in Anthropic’s communications in 2026, “risk” appeared 336 times; “safeguard”, 121 times; and “vulnerability”, 128 times. At OpenAI, these terms were used 30, 33 and 10 times respectively.

When asked about Mythos in a podcast interview in April, Altman said: “It is clearly incredible marketing to say, ‘We have built a bomb. We are about to drop it on your head’.”

Anthropic has long sought to position itself as the AI industry’s conscience. It frequently releases research papers and statements about the potential harms of the technology. It has also repeatedly called for greater government intervention.

Days before the export ban, Amodei published a long blog post on his personal website arguing that regulators were moving too slowly on AI.

“In the last few months . . . the evidence of AI’s incredible power, as well as its risks, has become undeniable,” he wrote, adding that Mythos demonstrated “very real risks to cyber security, creating the potential for disruption of the financial sector, critical infrastructure and national security”.

But the post was far from the “doomiest” Anthropic publication analysed by the FT. A news item from April 2025 about rare AI behaviours, such as sabotage or providing information about weapons, contained roughly three times more negative language.

The FT analysis also found that Anthropic had softened its language significantly since 2023, as its AI tools had gained popularity. Its use of risk and regulation-related language has roughly halved from the same period in 2023.

Overall, the data showed that while Anthropic’s public communications were largely positive in tone, they were less so than OpenAI’s.

Anthropic has billed Mythos as capable of discovering critical cyber security gaps, initially limiting its access on safety grounds to certain US organisations. The company had been working with government officials on a controlled rollout before releasing Mythos more widely earlier this month.

News coverage of Mythos, which the company announced in April, was significantly higher than coverage of other models released this year, according to data from AlphaSense. Media mentions of Mythos surged after it was unveiled and again this week following the export ban.

Some in the industry have criticised Anthropic’s handling of government talks over the new models.

David Sacks, former AI tsar to the US government, wrote on X that a “credible trusted partner” had approached the administration with a way to circumvent the guardrails placed on Fable. Anthropic had downplayed their concerns, he claimed, forcing the government to “reluctantly” impose the ban.

The export ban follows public clashes between Anthropic and senior government figures over issues such as the use of Anthropic’s technology in domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons. In February, the Pentagon named Anthropic as a supply-chain risk to national security. The two sides are in litigation over the designation.

Anthropic declined to comment.

Research shows that the government’s recent move may tally with US public opinion, with YouGov polling showing that the majority surveyed agreed that effective regulation was important even if it slowed technological advances.

French President Emmanuel Macron this week said the Anthropic dispute had “clarified the stakes” for the US and its allies in the G7. He called for “stronger regulation of artificial intelligence” and warned against the risk of “non-cooperation among democracies”.

Lennart Heim, an independent AI policy researcher who formerly worked at think-tank Rand, said the US government’s response did “not inspire confidence”.

“You have an administration that has positioned itself as pro-innovation, has pushed to export advanced AI chips to China, and has criticised safety-focused regulation — and then it turns around and bans the most advanced US model.”