On June 2, about a week before Anthropic released its Cloud Fable 5 model, it announced that it had added 150 new organizations to Project Glasswing, a program that allows (theoretically) trustworthy companies, governments, and other entities to try out the cybersecurity capabilities of Anthropic’s (theoretically) very dangerous post-release AI model, Cloud Mythos Preview.
According to a new report from the Washington Post, it was part of a move that put Anthropic on a collision course with the White House’s dramatic export control directive, which essentially took Anthropic’s flagship consumer model, the Fable 5, offline on Friday.
Here, however, it is worth pausing over a revelation in the Washington Post’s anonymously sourced story: “Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.” This is worth keeping in mind in light of the fact that, according to Saturday’s Wall Street Journal story (once again obtained from an anonymous source), the triggering event for the White House export control directive was a tip from current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, stating that Amazon researchers had demonstrated that they could jailbreak Fable and force it to perform cybersecurity tasks it should not be allowed to do.
At any rate, the Post said that weeks earlier, Anthropic had shown the Trump administration a list of 111 organizations it was planning to add to Project Glasswing, and then apparently disclosed that “approximately 50 additional entities had already received access.” One of these was apparently a South Korean telecommunications company that the Trump administration believed had “ties to China.”
This alleged China connection was touched upon in previous reporting, but vaguely. It was mentioned in a story in Semaphore on Saturday, without any clarity as to how far back in time it was. “It is unclear how the White House became aware of this issue, which organization gained access to the model, and how it got access to the mythos,” Semaphore wrote at the time. Well now it’s somewhat clear: Anthropic only provided access to one organization, but the White House deemed it too close to China. The post says Anthropic revoked this mysterious organization’s access, but not without upsetting Trump administration officials.
So according to this new outline of events, the export control directive was already locked and loaded. And the Amazon researchers’ findings were the last straw.
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