I get your reasoning but I think you're misreading this. The Trump admin has had access to Mythos for a couple months and certainly had access to pre-release Fable for more than a week but they wait until 5:30p on a Friday to send a broad and unworkable demand for a company to remove its flagship products from access to anyone who is not a confirmed U.S. citizen under severe penalties for any violation.

What penalties? Treason is still punishable by death in the U.S. I hate that I just felt compelled to write that as a serious possibility and, pre-Trump 2.0, I would have accused anyone citing that as scaremongering. But times have changed and this administration hates Anthropic vehemently. Anthropic is the only major AI company not "playing ball" with the DoW and donating to Trump's pet projects.

I truly believe if Mythos was an OAI or Google model, there would have been exactly the kind of discussion you imagine and this would have all been worked out. I deeply regret that recent facts make the most likely conclusion that this late-Friday ban was planned for days (if not weeks). And there was no real attempt to work anything out about Mythos, because that's not really what the DoW wants.

The driver behind this is the still unresolved dispute of Anthropic's Acceptable Use Policy regarding autonomous lethal weapons and mass domestic surveillance, which conflicted with the Pentagon's push for unrestricted model deployment ("all lawful uses"). This is the DoW's counter-attack. I fully expect that the DoW is going to hold Anthropic (and Ant's IPO) hostage by blocking any new model until Anthropic gives the DoW full access with no restrictions except "all lawful uses" (and the DoW's position is their in-house lawyers decide what's legal).