The Anthropic Fable mess, explained
- Fable 5 also featured distillation protections and a strict 30-day data retention policy that Anthropic claimed would help “defend against complex and novel attacks (including new jailbreaks and attacks that operate across many requests) as well as help [it] identify and reduce false positives.”
- At this juncture, the core complaint levied against Anthropic was that it was too cautious; that by keeping Mythos private and releasing only a security-minded version of the model (Fable), it was creating a two-tier AI market. People didn’t like that!
Anthropic had “previously notified the government multiple times” about its June 9th release date for Fable before the launch.
June 10: Anthropic releases two frameworks to address advanced AI development and its economic impacts. The papers called for “government action and for regulation—regulations that are carefully designed to prevent government overreach and protect innovation,” including, when “a model poses risks of this kind,” allowing the government to “have the legal authority to block or deter its deployment.”
June 11: Amazon’s Andy Jassy reportedly told the government that its researchers had found a way to get Fable 5 to “provide [it] with information that could be used to aid cyberattacks and was supposed to be off-limits.” (At least five other companies chimed in, too, making this less an Amazon-specific point, even if it was a key actor.)
June 12: Senior White House staff and administration leaders met to discuss the situation, then brought Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei into the conversation via phone. (This took 1.25 hours per Politico, with the company saying that it offered other senior execs in the interim; there’s beef about why it took so long to get Amodei on the horn. We can skip the drama and focus on what matters.)
June 12, continued: Amodei viewed the issue as a misunderstanding and argued that the reported “bypass” did not “pose the same risk as a broader ‘jailbreak.’” The White House “urged” Anthropic “to voluntarily remove the model and coordinate with the government to address the vulnerabilities.” Amodei asked for more “time and information, but he made no commitments to pull the model.”
- Politico reports that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent “told Amodei directly that he was making a ‘bad decision,’ according to the senior White House official.”
June 12, even more: After failing to reach a deal with Anthropic, the Trump administration imposed export controls on both Fable 5 and Mythos 5 (the two available versions of Mythos-class models, with differing safety limits).
- Anthropic responds by saying that the “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” meant it must “abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.” (Emphasis original.)
Good Guy Anthropic, the argument
Anthropic built a new, more powerful AI model that it believed had unique, novel cyber-related capabilities. It wanted to get ahead of the model’s cybersecurity risks, so it quickly assembled a group of leading technology companies and provided them with subsidized early access; governments red-teamed Fable’s safeguards before launch…
**Continue reading on Cautious Optimism**
This is an excerpt from Cautious Optimism , a modestly upbeat publication focused on technology, business, and power. **Read the cases for and against Anthropic, plus where Alex Wilhelm lands, on Cautious Optimism.**
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