LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman criticized the U.S. government's export control actions against Anthropic's AI models during a June 2026 podcast interview. The U.S. government issued an export control order on June 11, 2026, suspending foreign national access to Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models.

Hoffman stated there might be a legitimate cybersecurity basis for the government's actions but described the approach as "autocratic willy-nilly" and "very sub-optimum." He added, "It doesn't look like there's anything that's a particular principled, here's-the-way-that-we're-navigating-through-things, apply-kind-of-a-rule-of-law-and-predictability." Hoffman also stated that xAI was on its third restart and that all of its founders had left the company, saying, "XAI is, as Elon himself has described, it's a complete train wreck for its kind of building of foundational models and other kinds of things." By May 2026, all 11 of xAI's original co-founders had departed the company, with Tony Wu resigning in February 2026.

Hoffman compared Anthropic and OpenAI, noting that Anthropic is strong in code and expanding into design and legal sectors, while OpenAI and ChatGPT function more like a consumer search front-end. He addressed concerns about AI's impact on employment, referring to college graduates who may be wary of AI. "You guys have the opportunity to be generation AI—where you come into the workforce saying, 'I know this a lot better than all of you,'" Hoffman said. "You should be hiring me in order to help you become AI native organizations and so forth.'"