Anthropic Leaders Are Reportedly in Washington, D.C. Trying to Resolve Their Latest Issues With the Trump Administration
A “source close to” embattled AI company Anthropic says senior company members are working to come to an agreement with the Trump Administration in Washington, D.C. on Sunday after a White House order essentially forced Anthropic’s flagship product to be taken offline, according to Axios. On Friday, Anthropic’s most prized advanced AI models were disabled by the company after the federal government issued an export control order requiring that Anthropic not allow them to be used by non-U.S. nationals. Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 are so-called “Mythos-class” models, meaning they’re models built on the same core technology as Claude Mythos Preview, the notorious model Anthropic announced in April. It claimed at the time that Mythos Preview was too powerful to release due to high potential for abuse that may have jeopardized global cybersecurity—as well as presenting other supposed dangers.
Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the models taken down Friday are meant to be tamed versions of Mythos Preview, made safe by extensive and conspicuous guardrails. Those models had a brief life as publicly available products that could be accessed by users with paid Claude accounts, which lasted from Tuesday until Friday night—supposedly because the federal government was alerted to potential jailbreaks that could have allowed users to bypass the safeguards.
What exactly led to the takedowns is slowly being pieced together after the fact. It seems that Amazon was among the companies that drew the White House’s attention to supposed potential security holes in Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. Earlier reporting from Axios claims that on Thursday evening and Friday morning, Amazon and five other companies notified the White House that they had demonstrated the ability to perform the dreaded jailbreaks. According to an additional anonymously-sourced report from Semafor, the White House was also concerned that “a China-linked group” had gained access to a Mythos-class model (Semafor notes that Anthropic doesn’t allow access to its AI models from China).
On Friday afternoon, Axios claims Anthropic received a call from the White House telling them that keeping Fable 5 and Mythos 5 online constituted an unspecified “national security threat” and that the company had 90 minutes to disable them. It’s not clear what happened over the next several hours, but on Friday evening the export control order was apparently delivered via a letter to Anthropic, and several hours after that the models were taken offline. Axios’s Sunday story also says the Trump Administration has been unsatisfied with Anthropic’s handling of the jailbreak complaint. Anthropic reportedly has not “engaged in a serious manner.” Sunday is President Trump’s 80th birthday, and the day of a scheduled UFC match to be staged on the White House lawn where a UFC octagon fighting ring has been set up.
