The US administration has threatened the head of one of the largest artificial intelligence companies with prison for risky actions with the technology.
The US administration has threatened the head of one of the largest artificial intelligence companies with prison for risky actions with the technology.
US President Donald Trump said this in an interview with the "60 Minutes" program. According to Trump, the White House team was faced with a situation where an unnamed top manager was doing "something bad with artificial intelligence."
"We called them very strongly and said, 'Get ready for jail. Please kiss your wife goodnight. Do you like the color orange? [US prisoners wear orange robes]. Go home immediately. See your wife and kids. Kiss them goodnight, because tomorrow morning you're going to jail,'" Trump shared the details of the conversation.
He declined to name the CEO or the specific company, but said it was "one of the largest" technology firms in the industry. Trump added that after the warning, the unnamed CEO "completely changed his approach," and that while the CEO's actions themselves may have been malicious, Trump does not 100% believe they were.
In the winter of 2026, the Trump administration placed Anthropic on a national security blacklist . At the time, the Pentagon required the company to provide the military with unfettered access to its advanced artificial intelligence model, Claude, without any restrictions.
Anthropic publicly responded that it “cannot in good conscience agree” to the demands, even under threat of contract termination. The company said it would not compromise its principles of not using AI to monitor US citizens or integrate it into fully autonomous weapons systems.
In the fall, a voluntary AI security agreement was signed at the White House at an event attended by Sundar Pichai (Google), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Elon Musk (xAI), and Jensen Huang (Nvidia), which Trump called "morally binding."
