On a Friday evening in June, Anthropic was reportedly given roughly 90 minutes to pull two of its most advanced AI models from foreign access after the U.S. Commerce Department invoked national security export controls. The company had built Fable 5 and Mythos 5 into products used by businesses, researchers, and governments around the world. Within an hour and a half, all of that came to a halt for users outside the United States.
By the time most people read about it, the story already had several competing versions. Anthropic said no specific concerns had been raised before the order arrived. A White House adviser gave a different account on social media, saying the company had been asked to fix or withdraw the model and had refused. Amazon, whose CEO had reportedly flagged the issue to officials in the first place, declined to detail its conversations with the government. Politicians in Europe and Canada weighed in within days, framing the episode as proof that countries depend too heavily on a small number of overseas tech providers.
None of this happened over weeks. It happened over a weekend, with several parties shaping the narrative in real time and an affected company holding very little control over how the story unfolded.
When the Clock Runs Out Before You’re Ready
Most advice about handling a difficult news cycle assumes there’s at least some time to think. A journalist calls for comment and gives a deadline of a few hours. A regulator sends a letter that requires a response within days. Even in genuinely bad situations, there’s usually a window to gather facts, loop in legal counsel, and draft something considered.
The Anthropic situation didn’t offer that. A decision that would normally take weeks of internal deliberation, paired with a public response that would normally go through several rounds of review, had to happen in the time it takes to have lunch.
This is the part of the story that’s most useful for business owners, regardless of industry. The specific issue, an AI model and an export control order, is unusual. But the structure of the problem isn’t. A supplier could lose a critical certification overnight. A regulator could issue an order with immediate effect. A long-running dispute with a partner could become public the moment one side decides to talk to a journalist. A safety issue identified internally could become a story before a company has finished investigating it.
In each of these cases, the same dynamic plays out: an organisation is handed a decision and a public moment at the same time, with no separation between the two.
Why Having Something Ready Beats Having Something Perfect
The instinct in a fast-moving situation is to wait until there’s a complete picture before saying anything. That instinct is understandable, but it tends to backfire. While a company stays quiet to get its messaging right, other parties involved, partners, regulators, and commentators, are often already talking. By the time the company is ready to speak, the story has already been shaped by everyone else’s version of events.
What tends to work better is having a basic structure ready in advance. A holding statement should:
- Acknowledge that a situation is developing
- Confirm the company is looking into it
- Commit to providing more information once it’s available
This isn’t a polished explanation. It’s a placeholder that buys time and signals the company is aware and engaged, rather than absent or caught off guard.
Alongside this, it helps to know in advance:
- Who within the organisation is authorised to speak publicly
- Who needs to be informed immediately once a situation arises
- What the approval chain looks like for anything beyond the initial holding statement
When these decisions have to be made on the spot, in the middle of an unfolding situation, they tend to take far longer and create exactly the kind of delay that lets other narratives take hold.
The Cost of Letting Other People Tell Your Story
One of the more striking elements of the Anthropic episode is how many different accounts of the same event ended up in the public domain within days. Each party involved had its own version, its own framing, and its own incentives for how the story should be understood. For an outside observer, sorting out what actually happened became almost secondary to watching the disagreement play out.
For a business in a similar position, even on a smaller scale, such fragmentation is costly. If a company doesn’t put forward its own account of events early, the gap gets filled by whoever is willing to talk, whether that’s a disgruntled partner, a competitor, or simply public speculation. Once those alternative versions are out there, correcting them takes far more effort than getting ahead of them would have.
Identifying Your Own “90-Minute Scenarios”
The most practical takeaway from this story isn’t really about AI policy or export controls. It’s about asking a simple question: what situations in your business might require you to make a public-facing decision with almost no notice?
For some businesses, this might look like:
- A data security incident
- A regulatory inspection that results in an immediate order
- The sudden departure of a senior leader
- A product safety issue
- A dispute with a major client or supplier that becomes public before either side is ready
The value isn’t in predicting exactly what will happen. It’s in having thought through, in advance, what the first hour of any of these scenarios would look like: who gets told first, who speaks on behalf of the company, and what the initial public statement says before all the facts are confirmed.
Anthropic’s situation played out on a global stage, with government officials, foreign leaders, and international media all weighing in within days. Most businesses will never face anything close to that scale. But the underlying lesson scales down perfectly well: when the moment comes that you have no time to prepare, the only thing that helps is having prepared already.
If your business doesn’t currently have a plan for the situation that gives you no warning, now is a good time to build one. LITMUS works with business leaders to put these frameworks in place before they’re needed, so that when the unexpected happens, the response is ready to go rather than written from scratch. Let’s have a discussion with our team to build a communication framework that fulfills your business objectives.
