“To my knowledge, this is the first time US export controls have been used to control access to an AI model in this way.”

The Trump administration has not publicly explained the legal basis for the order, but in a statement on its website, Anthropic said the government cited “national security authorities” to justify “an export control directive” on the models. (Anthropic also claimed that the government’s concerns about a “jailbreak” potentially used by groups linked to China to access its models did not allow users to circumvent all of the company’s safeguards.)

But why did the administration use export control rules to address this? Experts say the episode appears to be unprecedented, exposing an uncertain and unstable stage in AI governance. And what, exactly, is Anthropic supposed to be exporting? (The company did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment.)

Export controls have traditionally applied to things that can be shipped across borders: weapons, hardware, tools, that kind of thing. Over time, the framework has expanded to cover less tangible goods, such as software, source code, technical data, and even 3D-printed gun files. These are still discrete things that can be copied, downloaded, published, or otherwise handed over and taken, not simply used through a remote service like a chatbot. In the context of AI, President Joe Biden moved to control AI model weights — the core data that makes a model work that can be copied and run elsewhere — in this manner; this idea was swiftly abandoned by the Trump administration in the second term.