Shortly afterward, White House officials held a meeting to discuss how to respond and security researchers began testing Amazon’s claims. The group decided that the most direct way to address that risk was by preventing foreign governments, companies and individuals from accessing the tool, the people said. President Trump later signed off on the action, a senior White House official said. 

The administration had long felt that Anthropic, one of the leaders in America’s AI race, couldn’t be trusted to manage the security risks its new model presented. Friday’s call between some administration officials and Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei reinforced that feeling, the people said. 

In response to the government’s move, Anthropic said it was shutting off access to Mythos and Fable to all users to make sure it complied, potentially hampering efforts by companies around the world to use the tools to identify software vulnerabilities. Many of the company’s researchers are foreign-born, meaning the government’s rule effectively prevented them from working on the latest models, Anthropic said. 

The talk with Amazon—a big investor in Anthropic that supplies the AI company with chips for data centers, while deploying its best models to identify software vulnerabilities—are a sign of how America’s largest companies and governments are navigating the emerging technology’s novel capabilities. Friday’s rapid events show how quickly new discoveries and experimentation can affect government restrictions and, potentially, company fortunes.

“As a leading cloud provider that serves a large number of private and public sector customers, it’s not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks. When they occur, we don’t share the details of these discussions,” an Amazon spokesman said. 

Anthropic has said that the vulnerabilities like those flagged by Amazon are relatively basic, that other publicly available models are capable of discovering them, and that they don’t represent a full so-called jailbreak, a point of view shared by some security researchers familiar with Amazon’s research. 

The startup says it has adequate safeguards in place and is known for giving priority to safety. It previously held off expanding access to Mythos at the direction of the White House.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

“It’s an illegal military organization in Lebanon. It’s an armed extension of Iran,” he continued, “which Iran uses to control Lebanon and destabilize the whole Middle East.”

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That’s an excellent summary to burst French illusions. The Hezbollah terrorists who wear suits and give speeches answer to the same leaders as the Hezbollah terrorists who use rockets and bombs to kill Israelis, Syrians, Americans and Jews everywhere. But even getting the French to permit EU sanctions on Hezbollah’s military in 2013 was a headache.

The argument is that the West needs to deal with Hezbollah to retain influence, encourage moderation and preserve stability. France, as the former colonial power, has a special relationship with Lebanon—and equities to protect. This was the basis of the compromise that pretends Hezbollah has discrete branches.

Hezbollah itself denies its political and military wings are separate entities, and EU engagement with the terrorists’ political representatives has yielded no moderation. Instead Lebanon’s instability worsened, as Hezbollah reconstituted its military, weakened and in some areas replaced the Lebanese state, massacred Syrians, and started two more wars with Israel.

Since 2013 several European states have had to take national measures against Hezbollah rather than wait for “EU consensus.” Germany found Hezbollah had fundraising, recruitment and propaganda networks on its soil, and Berlin took action in 2020. Hezbollah has conducted terrorism across Europe and supplements its Iranian subsidy by working the drug trade.

Listing Hezbollah in its entirety as a terrorist group wouldn’t tie France’s hands diplomatically, but it would help close networks across Europe that promote and finance terrorism. After Mr. Raggi’s forthright comment, no one can pretend that France blocks sanctions against Hezbollah for Lebanon’s sake.

Pro-Iranian Hezbollah militants parade during a ceremony, Beirut, Sept. 20, 2025. Marwan Naamani/Zuma Press

As Ukraine’s 35-year-old defense minister strolled about in tennis shoes, jeans and a fleece, gazing at displays of his country’s latest crop of oddball weapons, he paused to eye one gigantic, ungainly new device.

It was a drone with muscular carbon fiber arms stretching eight feet to each side, propellers the size of scythes, and a sprawl of wires, protruding antennas and Velcro straps. The drone substitutes for a 155-millimeter howitzer, carrying shells to targets and dropping them.

“Can you make it bigger?” the minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, asked the drone’s developers during a recent defense exhibition. They were working on it, they replied.

The future of warfare is being written in Ukraine, and Mr. Fedorov, a technology evangelist who is four months into his job, is one of its authors.

In the same way that apps remade taxi services and food delivery, Mr. Fedorov believes that warfare is ripe for disruption. That, he says, means offloading the fighting as much as possible onto machines — including, someday, those that can make lethal decisions on their own.

“The world needs security, and only autonomous weapons can ensure it,” Mr. Fedorov said in an interview in his office at the Ministry of Defense. “Autonomous weapons are the new nuclear weapons. Countries that possess them will be protected.”

While killer robots may seem a horrifying prospect, something out of dystopian science fiction, the race for them is on worldwide.

In Ukraine, the use of artificial intelligence in weapons is still in its infancy. It is most helpful now in target recognition, like helping a drone pilot pick out a camouflaged tank hidden in a forest. But the technology is improving, and Mr. Fedorov sees it as a pillar of Ukraine’s broader embrace of new-generation weapons that have kept its outnumbered military in the fight.

These weapons power a strategy, devised by Mr. Fedorov and endorsed by President Volodymyr Zelensky, that is intended to force Russia into a settlement to end the war.

The strategy, called Air, Land, Economy, envisions using drones and other advanced weapons to intercept at least 95 percent of incoming Russian drones and missiles; to kill or seriously injure more soldiers than Moscow can recruit; and to weaken the Russian economy by blowing up oil export terminals.

There has been pushback within the Ukrainian military against Mr. Fedorov’s futuristic talk of robot warfare, leading to what analysts say is a power struggle between him and generals. Some commanders say the idea of a rapid transition to unmanned battle is disconnected from the grim reality of muddy trenches and broken bodies.

Mr. Fedorov appears undeterred. In the interview, he said he held about a dozen meetings a day, working 10 or 12 hours, as part of his mission to push the military to adopt technology more quickly. He gets by on a restrictive diet that includes salads and bread made from buckwheat.

His interest in technology began with the video games he played as a teenager in the steel-making city of Zaporizhzhia. He turned his hobby into a tech career, starting a digital advertising business before graduating from college, and becoming a partner with Facebook in selling targeted ads on the platform.

Mr. Zelensky hired Mr. Fedorov to run social media advertising for his 2019 presidential campaign, then appointed him at age 28 to lead the ministry in charge of digitizing government services.

When Mr. Fedorov, who has never served in the military, moved to the Defense Ministry this January, he brought with him a team of advisers and data analysts. Mostly young men and women, they stand out for wearing sweatshirts to work. Mr. Fedorov set up a Ping-Pong table in one hallway.

Through the full-scale war that started in 2022, Mr. Fedorov has been Ukraine’s point person for contact with Silicon Valley. To attract military technology, he has promoted the war as a test bed for defense ventures.

He has met in Ukraine with Alex Karp, the chief executive of the defense-focused data analysis company Palantir, and with Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive of Google who founded a venture fund, D3, focused on weapons development in Ukraine.

After a meeting this week with Mr. Karp, Mr. Fedorov said that Ukraine was working with Palantir to further integrate A.I. into warfare, including systems to analyze air attacks, process intelligence data and plan for deep strikes into Russia.

During the recent defense-technology exhibition that Mr. Fedorov attended, a vast array of innovative Ukrainian battlefield products — the sort he has championed — were on display.

There were spools of fiber-optic wire that guide drones impervious to electronic jamming. There was a weapon made from a balloon, a palm-sized surveillance drone and a green unmanned ground vehicle that looked like a table mounted on a mini-bulldozer. There were dozens of prototypes of small “smart” weapons to replace machine guns, sniper rifles, tanks and artillery systems.

Mr. Fedorov eyed one microwave-oven-sized remote-controlled plane with a plastic fuselage shaped like a loaf of bread. The weapon, a dirt-cheap exploding drone, was called Loaf. “That’s a game changer,” he said.

Like much Ukrainian battlefield tech, the devices appeared soldered or duct-taped together in someone’s garage. Mr. Fedorov asked about prices. Everything had to be cheap and disposable, he said, because a lot would be shot down or blown up.

Mr. Fedorov wants to use this technology to eliminate as many Russian soldiers as possible.

Both armies endure high casualties, as drones buzz continually over the battlefield, posing lethal dangers to any soldier or vehicle that moves within the “kill zone,” a miles-wide strip along the front line that is dominated by unmanned weapons.

Mr. Fedorov called this phase of the war “targeted destruction.” He said his goal was to raise the Russian casualty rate from about 35,000 killed and wounded a month now to more than 50,000, a level he said would slow the invasion and then halt it.

An aide, Valeriya Ionan, said Mr. Fedorov “believes in the mathematics of war.”

In the future, Mr. Fedorov said in the interview, robotic systems will do all of the fighting. The kill zone will empty of people entirely, he said. Unmanned systems will fight among themselves, he added, on the ground and in the air.

As robotic systems improve, he said, there will be an understanding that large-scale human losses in war “are unsustainable, and warfare will evolve again.”

Wars, however, tend to spiral in unpredictable directions, and taking humans out of the loop could compound that risk.

Mr. Fedorov’s vision has at times conflicted with that of Ukraine’s military leaders.

The armed forces’ commander in chief, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, has not shied away from battles fought with traditional tactics of armored vehicles and infantry maneuvering in the fields. He won major victories earlier in the war with such strategies.

A dispute between Mr. Fedorov and the military command spilled into the open last month.

A Ukrainian unit called Skala attempted a risky assault in armored vehicles near the city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, losing four vehicles. Soldiers were killed and wounded, though the numbers are disputed.

Afterward, an adviser to Mr. Fedorov, Serhii Sternenko, sharply criticized the tactics in a social media post. “We often laugh at the enemy when he sends his troops in columns,” Mr. Sternenko wrote, referring to armored columns. “Treating our people like this is a crime. There should be accountability.”

Skala lashed back, accusing Mr. Sternenko of nurturing fantastical ideas unhinged from battlefield realities.

In a post on its Facebook page, the unit wrote that the assault group took necessary risks to save comrades in need of backup. “If Mr. Sternenko knows how to organize assault actions against the enemy’s strong points in Pokrovsk,” it said, he should enlist in the army and fight.

Still, frontline brigades have generally embraced whatever edge technology can bring.

“We have a young minister who is into technology, who is on one wavelength with us,” said Kyrylo Veres, commander of the K-2 brigade, which was an early adopter of exploding first-person-view drones early in the war. With Mr. Fedorov, “we don’t have to explain anything,” Mr. Veres added.

Public opinion polls show wide support for Mr. Fedorov’s work as defense minister. Mr. Zelensky has praised him, saying he is “grateful for the increasing volumes” of drones reaching the military.

One silver lining of the war, Mr. Fedorov said, has been the vast troves of data it has generated.

He is leading an effort to monetize or trade Ukrainian war data, including a library of more than five million annotated videos of the battlefield filmed by surveillance and strike drones. These include footage showing how humans behave as killer drones close in, such as running or hiding.

Last month, the Defense Ministry, through a program called Avenger Labs, opened up the data sets to companies from allied nations to train artificial intelligence models.

Human rights groups oppose the use of A.I. in lethal weapons. But Mr. Fedorov argued that “the risks are not as high as you think.” For now, the technology is focused mostly on identifying military equipment, not soldiers, aides said.

Access to Avenger Labs is conditioned on Ukraine receiving the A.I. models that are produced from the data. About 20 companies have expressed interest.

“It’s a win-win approach,” Mr. Fedorov said.

Evelina Riabenko and Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting from Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine.

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Business executives have begun to balk at the high prices for AI usage. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said at a recent event that costs had become “a huge issue.”

“I think we’ll have a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend,” he said.

Drastic price cuts could potentially erode the profit margins of both companies, which already lose billions of dollars because of the enormous cost for computing resources needed for AI systems to process queries and carry out tasks.

OpenAI is trying to catch up with its younger rival in the race to win enterprise customers that are paying large amounts of money for AI tools that can improve workplace productivity. Anthropic’s revenue recently surged after its coding tool Claude Code went viral among software engineers, and the five-year-old startup surpassed OpenAI’s valuation for the first time. OpenAI has since made its own coding tool Codex a focus of the company.

Some corporations poured so much money into Anthropic’s products that their leaders are now seeking to rein in spending. Earlier this year, an Uber executive said the company had maxed out its 2026 budget for agentic, or autonomous, AI use, and another company leader said last month that it was difficult to link AI coding productivity improvements to new customer features.

Such comments from many executives have triggered a debate within Silicon Valley about tokenmaxxing, or the practice of using as many tokens as possible to boost productivity, including in ways that don’t generate returns on investment.

A price war would be an early test of the strength of both companies’ business models ahead of hotly anticipated public listings. OpenAI and Anthropic have captured the majority of revenue from new AI products, powering their rise. But an underlying risk that investors have long identified is the interchangeability of their products, and the ease with which customers can abandon one for the other.

OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO earlier this week, following in the footsteps of Anthropic. In a recent Slack message to employees, Altman said the company plans to go public “within the next year.” The message was earlier reported by the Information.

The company said in a confidential filing statement that there were “things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” but declined to elaborate further. 

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.