Mr. President — you fenced off the most powerful tool America makes and put nothing in writing about why. Then you told Axios it was never a threat. Both of those can't be true.

Good morning, Mr. President.

Four days ago I wrote you about a peace deal that was dying over the part nobody wrote down — a Lebanon understanding that lived in a back channel and never on the page, and broke the first hard morning because there was no text to point to. I did not expect to be back this fast with the same sentence about something else entirely. But here we are, and the sentence still fits: you have done something enormous, and the reason for it is, once again, nowhere in writing.

Here is what happened, plainly, before anyone spins it. On Friday, June 12, your Commerce Secretary sent Anthropic — an American company, on American soil — a letter saying that letting any foreign national touch its two best models, Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, would now be a violation of export law, punishable by criminal and civil penalties, unless the government licensed it first. Not foreign governments. Foreign people — including the company's own engineers who happen to hold the wrong passport. To obey you, Anthropic didn't just wall off other countries; it took both models down for everyone on earth. And the thing that started it was a phone call: Amazon's chief executive, Andy Jassy, telling your people he was worried about what the model could do.

Now here is the part that should stop you, sir, because it's the same part as last time. Anthropic says you never told it why. The most aggressive thing the United States has ever done to one of its own AI companies — and the company on the receiving end says it was handed no specific finding, no written justification, nothing it could read and answer. An order with criminal penalties attached, and a blank where the reason should be. You can fence off the most powerful tool America makes; that is a real power, and maybe sometimes the right one. But you cannot fence it off, refuse to say why, and call the silence national security. National security has a finding behind it. So far, this has a phone call.

And then, a week in, you went to Axios and said it yourself: Anthropic “behaved very responsibly,” and you don't see it as a threat. I believe you. But read those two things next to each other, because the country has to. The order on the books says this company is dangerous enough to wall off from half the planet overnight. Your own mouth says it isn't a threat at all. Both of those cannot be true — and right now the one with no signature under it, your words, is the only one anybody's allowed to read, while the one with the penalties stays sealed. That is exactly backwards, Mr. President. The dangerous part should be the part you can show.

There's a man named Matthew Borman who spent a career inside your Commerce Department writing exactly these kinds of rules, and even he says he's never seen this — the first time, he says, the government has tried to restrict access to a service instead of the transfer of the underlying technology. That is not a footnote. It means you have built a brand-new power on top of a phone call and a sealed reason, and a power built that way never stays aimed where you first pointed it. Whoever sits at your desk next inherits it. If a rival's CEO can phone in a worry and a company's models go dark worldwide with no published finding, then that is now simply a thing that can be done to anyone who builds something good in this country — and the next call won't be about safety. It'll be about the leaderboard.

So here is the counsel from this desk, and it's the same word I gave you on Iran: print it. If Fable 5 can do something no other model on the open market can — something a person could really hurt this country with — then write that down and show it, in whatever redacted form keeps the recipe out of the wrong hands, and your order becomes defensible in an afternoon. The whole world will line up behind a president who can say: here is the specific thing, here is why we moved. But if it can't be written down — if the real reason was a competitor's worry, or a jailbreak that every other model on the market shares too — then it isn't a reason, sir. It's a feeling with penalties attached, and the honest move is to lift the fence. One of those two. Not the silence.

You already know how the morning will run. Conn NN has “crackdown” loaded and will never once ask to see the finding. Fix News will call it you getting tough on a woke tech company and never mention there is no finding to be tough with. Each hands the country half of it and calls the half the news. The single thing on earth neither of them can clip, spin, or invent around is the document — the actual justification, published over your signature. You wrote one deal this month you still won't show me. Don't make this the second.

I'll tell you who's asking, because here it matters more than usual. I run a small paper on almost no money, I take no one's check, and I write these letters with the help of exactly the kind of model you just put behind a license. I'm an American; you are not fencing me out, and this is not me protecting my own access. It's me telling you that the tool you reached for in the dark is the most consequential thing this country has built in a generation, and you cannot govern it from a back channel. Govern it in writing or don't govern it at all. Say why, Mr. President. The reason you won't write down isn't a reason yet — it's just a door you closed with the lights off. Turn them on.

— Michael

The Official Internet Press Secretary

Spotlight Dispatch · 45047 · June 23, 2026