Trump admin loves to do crazy shit on Friday nights. In this case, it's issuing "an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees."
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.
We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.
To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe. We will share more details over the next 24 hours.
We are complying with the government’s legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.
When they tried to do this to encryption, the cypherpunks managed to pull off a win. I wonder if it will go the same way this time round.
They wanted regulation, W
They sure made it sound that way. So, okay, they get what they want. How does it benefit them? They get a big moat? they get to use the regulation to keep everyone else from competing with them? Is there some other way this benefits them?
Incentives dictate they want regulatory capture, same way drug companies created the FDA, meat packers the USDA, Banks the Fed, etc
Question is did this backfire, or going better than expected... We can only speculate
This is great PR from a commercial standpoint, it just upped the value of gaining access. They couldn't sell a lot of it anyway because they're compute constrained, now they can sell it for 10x margin to megacorps that can deal with the export control frameworks and will spare no expense on security audits
Other possibility is their handlers expect to get back into power eventually, and ban any competition that doesn't fold into their globalist apparatus, so they're acting as tip of the spear on "safety" and setting the stage for Anthropic becoming the AI equivalent of the BBC/NBC/CBC... To protect you obviously.
Now, assuming patriots are in control... there's potential for a Goldilocks scenario...
Use the state as the communists would before they can, make things extremely difficult for Anthropic, just as they would do to others if it was their people were in control
Do this with the goal of having them try to work around it as we would
But, instead of closing the door to that workaround, leave it so wide open via precedent it becomes impossible to shut in the event power is lost
This door probably looks like open-weight models released under free speech protection (Fabel is a service, and the government is their largest customer be it directly or indirectly through primes).
From a patriots perspective this achieves 2 things
Gemma is a good indicator that there's a strategy to use open-weights to compress the margins of the frontiers and undermine Chinese distillation models. Industry will increasingly need open-weight models as more and more data they don't want to share gets leveraged. Google gives Gemma away to compress Anthropics margins while at the same timing selling more GCP private cloud services to sensitive customers they already have.
That
mightexplains why I just lost access to Fable in the middle of a chat.It's funny because I was telling someone yesterday that Fable is sensitive to emotive conjugation. It blocked me when I asked it to "find bugs," but assisted when I asked it to "harden the code."
I might be growing a paranoid, but my first thought was that OpenAI is behind this.
Well, the obvious thing is that Anthropic didn't play ball with the US government earlier this year (#1443175, #1444092, #1444092, #1438014).
However, I feel like the Anthropic guy was constantly running around saying their models were so dangerous and so powerful that they were going to end the world. So, while I'm hopeful that there will be a wave of public sentiment against such bans as this, I won't be surprised if it doesn't materialize.
Seems like we may be on the way to some kind of nationalizing of the big AI companies.
And now I can't pull up the announcement anymore:
if it is OpenAI, Anthropic looks like they are tattling on them:
Once they release a smarter model, it's so lame working with the last one. They are kind of dull.
maga maoism
The timing here is interesting. We're seeing AI become load-bearing infrastructure in security contexts — smart contract auditing, code review, vulnerability detection — right as the political environment starts treating powerful models as controlled exports. If you're running AI-assisted security tooling, this has direct implications: access to the frontier models that make automated vulnerability detection actually useful may become geographically restricted. Already thinking about fallback options.