Dispatch from Mitch
Fable and Mythos access cut after export control order
To the point where it’s hard to find any other kind of AI news today, it seems like all anyone on the AI beat can talk about is the latest flap between Anthropic and the U.S. government. That’s fine: We need to talk about it! Even if it gets resolved quickly, as most (but not all) seem to expect, it has important implications for the AI race moving forward.
As Anthropic tells it, at 5:21 p.m. yesterday, they received a directive from the U.S. government to suspend access to their best Claude models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, “by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.”
As the company has no practical way of knowing and guaranteeing the nationalities of its users, and was given no advance notice to figure something out, the only way it could comply with the order was to cut off all access to these models entirely. So they did.
Fable and Mythos users Friday evening were met with screens saying the model was unavailable, directing them to Anthropic’s page about it, and to the company’s next-best but lower-tier model, Opus 4.8.
Initial reactions from insiders were largely stunned, annoyed, and slightly panicked. On the individual level, many had looked forward to doing some serious building with Fable 5 this weekend, the first since its release. They found themselves cut off just after having had a tantalizing taste of it during the work week.
Some non-Americans fretted about their access to American models moving forward. Politico reported a sting felt in Europe, where the news spurred more talk about the need for “sovereign” models not subject to American whims. There was a lot of Twitter chatter about the many top researchers at Anthropic who aren’t U.S. citizens, but are mostly from close ally nations like Canada and the U.K.
And there were plenty of social media posts finding irony or schadenfreude in what just happened to the AI company that has been the most vocal about wanting government to regulate the industry.
But the larger shock was in how suddenly and totally the model was taken away, with no sign of any due process. This by a U.S. administration that for so long tried to insist it was taking a light touch. Just this month, the White House put out an executive order asking AI companies only for voluntary early access to new models. The order included language that nothing in it should be construed as the government setting up any kind of licensing authority that would get in the way of companies releasing models on their own schedules.
But with a single memo — an export control directive from the Commerce Department, the media learned — Anthropic was effectively knocked down to the level of its competitors, unable to sell access to its market-leading product.
This naturally fueled more speculation about how much of the administration’s on-again/off-again animus toward Anthropic might stem from ideological differences, and from business interests close to the President. The most obvious commercial beneficiary of a long Fable/Mythos outage would be OpenAI.
Today, the Wall Street Journal’s Amrith Ramkumar reported that the government had acted based on a report by researchers from Amazon who claimed to have jailbroken the new models in ways that could be used to find exploitable cyber vulnerabilities. Involved in discussions were Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Anthropic strongly disputes that the jailbreaks, and what they unlocked, constitute a threat any more significant than what bad actors could already do more easily and cheaply with existing public models. I have no idea who’s right.
Amazon, a major investor in Anthropic — which in turn rents much of its compute from Amazon — has little to gain and much to lose by sabotaging its partner, so this was probably not its intent. But it’s not hard to imagine that, moving forward, AI companies may dedicate considerable resources to trying to break their competitors’ models in ways they can tell the government about in alarming language.
And maybe that’s not the worst outcome? If competitors can get each other’s products pulled from the market by proving that they aren’t secure, this incentivizes everyone to make the strongest and most secure models, rather than merely the strongest. And in the likely event that nobody can adequately secure AIs trained with today’s black-box methods, this would effectively keep stronger models from making it to market at all, cutting off much of the revenue feeding the race to superintelligence.
I don’t think that’s an especially likely outcome, and it wouldn’t be enough: Labs could continue doing dangerous research internally, and their foreign-born researchers could take their talents elsewhere. But there’s a sense right now that we’re in uncharted territory, and nothing can be ruled out. I think this is an improvement over the status quo where most assumed that superintelligence was inevitable because the government would never dare tell the AI companies “No.” As MIRI’s president, Nate Soares, posted last night:
Inaction yesterday does not imply inaction today. An export control directive came out of nowhere, and a ban on superintelligence could too. Inevitabilism is wrong.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.