The United States government has issued a national security legal order to Anthropic to suspend access to their new Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI Models. The order effectively compels Anthropic to cut access for everyone as it would essentially be impossible to check foreign national status.
Export Control Directive
The United States government issued an Export Control Directive, which is a legal order that restricts or suspends the transfer of specific products, data, or technologies to foreign countries or citizens of another country.
Anthropic announced:
“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.”
The order was received by 5:21 PM EST. Anthropic’s explanation of the order cites that the United States government “believes: there is a way to bypass safety guardrails in Fable 5. Anthropic considers the examples they reviewed as minor vulnerabilities.
Anthropic Contradicts Government’s Cybersecurity Concern
Anthropic’s response is that they already have strong safeguards in place that make it unlikely for someone to misuse their Fable 5 AI Model. Their position appears to push back on the government assertion that there’s security risk.
They explained:
“We have instituted strong safeguards that greatly reduce the likelihood that Fable is misused for tasks related to cybersecurity (among others). In fact, our safeguards are so strong that many users have complained that they are overly broad.
…Given that perfect jailbreak resistance does not appear to be possible today, Anthropic adopted a defense in depth strategy with Fable 5. We aimed to make jailbreaks either narrow (in the case of non-universal jailbreaks) or very expensive to produce (in the case of universal jailbreaks), and to combine this with thorough monitoring to quickly detect and shut down any successful attacks.
We stand by this defense in depth strategy. It reduces the risks posed by Fable, making them comparable to the risks of existing models already deployed across the industry.
We have not even received a disclosure of a concerning non-universal potential jailbreak that led to a harmful result. The potential jailbreaks that have been disclosed to us are either entirely benign responses or are minor findings that provide no Mythos-specific uplift.”
United States Government Dispute With Anthropic
The United States government has had an ongoing dispute with Anthropic that arose from Anthropic’s refusal to allow their products used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapon systems, which are weapons that can independently select their targets and engage without additional human involvement.