Anthropic, the U.S. government, and the Mythos/Fable shutdown - a roundup of the latest news:
- Senior Anthropic staff are reportedly meeting with government officials in Washington today to try and diffuse the situation
- Axios sources framing the issue as a communication breakdown: "
"Anthropic has not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration and appreciate the ideological differences," one source familiar with the administration's thinking said.
"It's like they just speak in different languages," the source said, adding that the company has simply not figured out how to communicate with this administration.
- The Washington Post sources dispute the government's stance that CEO Dario Amodei refused to work with them on the safety issue, and were given just 90 minutes to comply with the order.
“Dario agreed to fix the problem if it was real, but they were never given anything until people started flagging this Amazon report,” one of the people said.
- Security researchers disagree with Trump admin on the alleged Fable jailbreak risk.
An open letter from titled "On Transparent AI Cyber Protections" details why Fable should be restored:
"We, the undersigned executives and technical leaders from across the United States and its allies, write to you to ask you to lift the export control directives on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos large language models and commit to an open, scientific and transparent process of handling AI risk assessments in the future."
Currently signed by dozens of researchers and industry members.
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 Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ
We’re rolling out changes to make Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development visible.
Starting this week, flagged requests will visibly fall back to Opus 4.8—the same as our safeguards for cyber and bio. You will see this every time it happens. On the API, any flagged requests will return a reason for their refusal (coming to server-side fallback in the next few days).
We wanted to deploy Fable 5 to our users quickly and safely. Visible safeguards can be probed, so they have to be robust, which takes time to get right. Invisible safeguards can be targeted more narrowly, allowing us to ship quickly with very few false positives. We went with invisible safeguards for this reason—and that was the wrong tradeoff. You should have visibility into the safeguards we have in place, and why. We’re sorry for not getting the balance right.
Making the safeguards visible makes them easier to work around, so keeping them robust to jailbreaks will unfortunately mean more false positives while we improve the classifiers. We're also tuning our bio and cyber classifiers to trigger less often on harmless requests. We know this is frustrating and we’ll do our best to keep this period as short as possible.
If you think a request has been mistakenly flagged: run /feedback in Claude Code, click thumbs-down on the fallback in https://t.co/LtktniD5HY or Cowork, or file the safeguard appeal form for API requests. Your reports help us tune these classifiers and we appreciate your feedback.
https://t.co/TDAAYRGqDt