According to Axios, a “source close” to embattled AI company Anthropic says senior members of the company are working to come to an agreement with the Trump administration in Washington, D.C., on Sunday after a White House order forced Anthropic to essentially take its flagship product offline.
On Friday, Anthropic’s most prized advanced AI models were disabled by the company after the federal government issued an export control order saying Anthropic would not allow them to be used by non-US citizens.
The Cloud Fable 5 and Cloud Mythos 5 are so-called “Mythos-class” models, meaning they’re models built on the same core technology as the infamous Anthropic Cloud Mythos Preview announced in April. It was claimed at the time that the Mythos Preview was too powerful to release due to the high potential for abuse, which would have jeopardized global cybersecurity – as well as introducing other potential threats.
The Fable 5 and Mythos 5, renamed versions of the Mythos Preview models dropped on Friday, are protected by wider and distinctive guardrails. Those models had a brief life as publicly available products that could be accessed by users with paid cloud accounts, which ran overnight from Tuesday to Friday – supposedly after the federal government was alerted to a potential jailbreak that could allow users to bypass security measures.
What exactly caused the eviction is slowly being pieced together after the fact. It seems that Amazon was one of the companies that drew the White House’s attention to potential security flaws in Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. Earlier reporting from Axios claimed that on Thursday evening and Friday morning, Amazon and five other companies notified the White House that they had demonstrated the ability to perform a dangerous jailbreak.
According to an additional anonymously-sourced report from Semaphore, the White House was also concerned that “a group linked to China” had gained access to Mythos-class models (Semaphore notes that Anthropic does not 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 is an unspecified “national security threat” and that the company has 90 minutes to disable them. It’s unclear what happened over the next several hours, but the export control order was apparently delivered via a letter to Anthropic on Friday evening, and the models went offline several hours later.
Axios’ story on Sunday also said the Trump administration is dissatisfied with the way Anthropic handled the jailbreak complaint. Anthropic reportedly “has not been involved in a serious way.”
Sunday is President Trump’s 80th birthday, and a scheduled UFC match will be held that day on the White House lawn, where a UFC octagon fighting ring has been set up.
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