Clay Valley Daily — Jun 25: Amodei Benched, Google Bleeds, Meta Spies

Anthropic called for AI regulation — and got their own CEO benched. Google watched four of its top scientists walk out the door in a single week. Meta refused government safety inspections while selling you a $299 spy gadget. Silicon Valley's most contradictory week, in clay.

Dario Amodei was quietly replaced as Anthropic's White House negotiator by co-founder Tom Brown after administration officials reportedly said Amodei was "too difficult to talk to." 1 Trump softened his "national security threat" language at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains — yet the export controls on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 remained in force. 2 The whole crisis was reportedly triggered when Amazon CEO Andy Jassy flagged a Fable 5 jailbreak to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. 3

John Jumper — 2024 Nobel Chemistry laureate and creator of AlphaFold — left Google DeepMind to join Anthropic. 4 Days earlier, Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer had defected to OpenAI. Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel were also reported to be leaving Google for Anthropic — four top AI scientists out the door in one week. 5

Meta launched $299 self-branded AI smart glasses while simultaneously refusing to participate in the White House's voluntary AI safety review program — the only major lab to decline. 6 Meta also announced a $14.3B deal to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI. 7