Trump officials told Inner Loop that if Anthropic Cloud wants to re-release Fable 5, the AI model that they took offline last week with export controls due to concerns about jailbreaking — a method of using signals to bypass a model’s security measures — the company would actually need to take steps to address the vulnerabilities that the government alleges.
Anthropic has said for several days that the administration’s concerns are overblown and the impact of the jailbreak is minimal. It reiterated this position to the Commerce Department and the office of national cyber director Sean Cairncross at a technical meeting on Monday.
But officials say they are debating whether jailbreaks are important, since the National Security Agency concluded that there are ways to disable guardrails on the Fable 5 that have been put in place to prevent users from accessing the Mythos model’s capabilities related to cybersecurity, chemistry and biology.
At this stage, the administration essentially views the situation as a man-made problem to be fixed, according to three people familiar with the discussions.
Neither the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation nor the National Security Agency have the staff or bandwidth to pursue every possible jailbreak on every model reaching the market, the people said.
As a result, the administration believes that Anthropic should be more proactive about proactively testing not only Fable 5 but all of its Frontier AI models to detect potential jailbreaks and flag them to the government itself.
But at a more basic level, it’s not clear how Anthropic is supposed to prevent jailbreaking.
Independent cybersecurity experts have increasingly taken the view that guardrails on AI models are only a stopgap solution, as skilled users and future AI models will find ways to circumvent the barriers – meaning what the White House wants cannot be done.
A White House spokesman declined to comment.
DNI = Do Not Invite
Earlier in the week, Bill Pulte, Trump’s pick to serve as acting Director of National Intelligence, was on track to never start the job. Now, Trump has thrown them a lifeline — and it’s the permanent DNI nominee, Jay Clayton, who now faces the possibility of never serving in the role.
In short: Trump initially named Pulte his housing finance chief, replacing outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard.
Faced with bipartisan opposition because Pulte did not have the national security experience required by law for the role and because he had reportedly flagged dubious mortgage fraud charges against Trump’s political enemies, Trump announced Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, as his nominee for permanent DNI.
Gabbard was scheduled to depart on June 18, while Pulte’s first day was scheduled for June 19. But Senate Republicans wondered, if Clayton’s trial could be fast-tracked to June 17 and begin by June 22, would Pulte even be able to enter the building?
On Wednesday, Trump blew up this plan. As part of a broader feud with the Senate Republican leadership over the filibuster, Trump announced that Clayton’s hearing would be delayed indefinitely, in an apparent effort to prevent Pulte from jumping the gun. Senate Republicans then announced that the hearing would continue unless Clayton appeared or his nomination was withdrawn.
The situation could be a blow to the office of the director of national intelligence, which Trump has directed Pulte to largely downsize, and staffers have not been impressed by Pulte’s minimal effort to get to know the agency and lack of regular briefings, people familiar with the matter said.
<a href