The war between Anthropic and Trump shakes the AI market

Donald Trump has not yet emerged from one war and has already declared another. The White House has just unleashed hostilities with Anthropic, the artificial intelligence giant behind the chatbot Claude. With the prohibition of the use of its most advanced models by foreign citizens, Claude Mythos 5 and its controlled version, Fable 5, Trump has forced the hand of the technology company led by Dario Amodei, which has been forced to exclude the entire product from the market due to the impossibility of filtering individual users. This is, as detailed by technology sources consulted by Empreses, a "before and after in the industry, an interference that destabilizes the market," says Josep Curto, an AI expert and founder of AthenaCore.

For the experts consulted, Mythos has the technological foundations to worry any government. It should be remembered that Anthropic reserved this software only for select clients and allied governments, including many from the European Union. According to the company, the system is a real risk to global cybersecurity, with the ability to identify blatant weaknesses in consolidated general-use systems. Not long ago, it was able to find more than 270 undetected holes in the popular Firefox browser. "If it can find vulnerabilities in a system that has undergone so many stress tests, it means its capacity is much higher than expected," reflects Aleix Valls, founder of WeArtificial. In this regard, according to the specialist, regulating a model like this "makes sense."

The policy of AI

However, the experts consulted detect political motivations behind Trump's move. It should be remembered that the administration had already burned bridges with Anthropic at the end of last February, when it withdrew a 200 million dollar contract with the Pentagon from the company led by Dario Amodei. The reason was precisely the company's refusal to remove certain technical limitations from its AI models, a move that would have allowed the federal government to use the systems for purposes that, according to Amodei, "would erode the country's democratic values," such as social surveillance. The contract ended up in the hands, precisely, of Open AI, which has shown itself to be "much more in line with Trump," in Curto's words, than its competitor.

Valls, it must be said, also points to the same executive, whom he accuses of having maintained a "sensationalist discourse" about the technology's capabilities. According to the expert, Anthropic has "generated fear" with the power of Mythos to ensure "favorable regulation" that would serve to close market access to new competitors and consolidate the dominance of existing ones. He also points to Open AI in this regard, although he acknowledges that Sam Altman's firm maintains a better relationship with the White House. Furthermore, the creator of ChatGPT "has not published any results" similar to those that Anthropic has hinted at. Amodei, he assures, "told the world he had a bomb, and that it needed to be regulated." And the bomb, in the end, exploded in his hands.

Stock market exits tremble

The open battle between Anthropic and Trump arrives at a key moment for the future of the two competitors for AI hegemony. Both the creator of Claude and Open AI have confidentially submitted documentation to follow the path marked by Elon Musk and SpaceX and undertake mega stock market exits that would place them among the most valuable companies in the world. In Curto's opinion, this move by Trump "does a lot of damage" to Anthropic's ability to attract investors, because now capital "knows that the government can leave them out of the market at any time".

However, Valls sees the company between a rock and a hard place. Although the White House's decision "introduces more volatility and uncertainty into the market", Amodei's team "cannot delay the initial public offering (IPO)". The AI giants, hand in hand with chip manufacturers and large tech companies, "have built a closed system that needs to consolidate capital". Companies like Nvidia, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft have dedicated hundreds of billions of dollars to financing both Anthropic and Open AI. Now, however, they need the injection of an open market exit. Without it, the expert warns, they would risk entering an "extraordinary financial spiral" that would put the entire sector at risk.

From the financial world, however, they view Trump's aggression with more calm. For XTB market analyst Javier Cabrera, the mirror of SpaceX's IPO suggests a promising future for Anthropic. Musk has shown, according to Cabrera, that "there is a huge demand for these companies". Furthermore, it comes at a time of high appetite for the creator of Claude, which recently surpassed 900 billion dollars in valuation. Moreover, unlike its competitors, "the business has started to work", and already seems to have clear paths to profitability.

Cabrera acknowledges, however, that this event will only be slightly abrasive for the sector if it is isolated. However, if the administration's intervention in AI companies is repeated, "it could begin to affect." "The sector's morale is very high, but the risk is also significant. If the government does not allow a company to bring its best model to market, it will not be able to increase revenue in a very competitive market," summarizes the analyst. The company, it must be said, has already suffered the first blows in terms of business, with the departure of two American financial giants: both JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have blocked Anthropic's models in their Hong Kong offices, and they signal a long-term problem for the firm. If the war ends with a blitz, then, Anthropic can breathe. But if it has to go down into the trenches, the future becomes unpredictable.