GoKawiilListen to this post: Log in to listen
I’m sympathetic to the cynics who consistently characterize Anthropic’s public statements, particularly those surrounding their model releases, as scare-mongering for the sake of marketing. It was only two months ago that Anthropic announced Mythos Preview, a model that they said was too dangerous to make publicly available, thanks in particular to its advanced cybersecurity capabilities. Then, two months later, the company publicly released Fable, a version of Mythos with various safety guardrails.
Fable is, in my limited experience, a very impressive model. It’s increasingly difficult to objectively evaluate models for anything other than coding performance, but there is subjective feel, and I found my interactions with Fable to be extremely impressive; it made other models, including GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8, feel small and dumb. The two times I felt that way previously were with GPT-4 and Grok 4, both of which represented new generations in terms of base model size and complexity; my sense is that Fable is downstream of a new pre-train and the first of a new generation.
To that end, I can certainly buy the case that Fable/Mythos is in fact more capable when it comes to identifying and exploiting security issues, and that Anthropic’s cautious roll-out was justified. The problem with publicly releasing models, however, is that guardrails can be jailbroken, and apparently that is exactly what happened shortly after the release.
Anthropic vs. the U.S. Government, Again
What happened next is somewhat unclear. Anthropic wrote in a blog post:
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.
Anthropic went on to make the case that non-universal jailbreaks were inevitable and also narrow, and that there was no evidence of a universal jailbreak; the jailbreak that was found, meanwhile, appears to have been reported by Amazon, which is notable given Amazon is both an investor in Anthropic and a major provider of inference to the company. As I write this, senior Anthropic staff are in Washington D.C. seeking to resolve what they insist is a misunderstanding, and which White House officials are suggesting is insouciance by the company’s leadership to legitimate national security concerns.
I don’t actually have much to add to the current conflict given how many facts are in dispute; what I am not surprised about is the fact that the conflict is happening: I already explained in Anthropic and Alignment why conflict between the U.S. government and Anthropic was inevitable. To that end, people who are arguing that Mythos isn’t powerful enough to warrant the government’s drastic action are missing the point: if it’s not powerful enough now, the next one will be, or the one after that, particularly now that models are increasingly useful in creating their successors.
That, however, raises another question — one that seems to validate the cynics’ viewpoint: if Mythos is so dangerous, why even release Fable in the first place, and why fight with the government doing exactly what you claim to want? In fact, I think that Anthropic’s actions are quite understandable; what makes the company unique is how it justifies them, and it is those justifications that both give the cynics their fuel and Anthropic its magic.
... continue reading