Anthropic's safety warnings may have just backfired - the government has pulled the plug on its most powerful AI
The U.S. government on Friday ordered Anthropic to immediately shut off worldwide access to two of its most powerful AI models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, citing national security concerns. Anthropic said it complied but disagreed strongly, arguing the underlying concern is a claimed narrow jailbreak of Fable 5 that amounts to capability already available in other public models like OpenAI's GPT-5.5. The episode is notable because Anthropic had restricted Mythos for being exceptionally good at finding software vulnerabilities, and that very caution now appears to have drawn the scrutiny that disrupted its business.
Key Takeaways
- Anthropic isn't hiding its frustration.
"We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people," the company wrote in a blog post.
- Access to Anthropic's other models isn't affected.
Mythos is Anthropic's most capable AI model, one the company previewed in early April and has kept tightly restricted ever since because of what Anthropic described as its exceptional ability to find security vulnerabilities in software.
- But in a lengthy blog post , Anthropic says its understanding is that the underlying concern is a claimed jailbreak of Fable 5.
So far, the company says, the government has provided only verbal evidence of a "potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak" - one that, as Anthropic describes it, amounts to prompting the model to read a specific codebase and identify software flaws.
- Clearly, none of that was enough to stop the government from acting, and Anthropic isn't hiding its frustration.
"We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people," the company wrote.
- In April, he told podcaster Ashlee Vance that Anthropic's handling of Mythos amounted to " fear-based marketing .
Stats & Key Facts
- #The directive, which Anthropic said it received on Friday at 5:21 pm ET, forces the company to disable both models for all users worldwide - not just the foreign nationals the government's export control order was nominally aimed at.
- #According to Anthropic, Mythos identified flaws in every major operating system and web browser it tested, so rather than release it broadly, the company launched a controlled program called Project Glasswing, sharing it with roughly 50 vetted organizations, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike, to use for defensive cybersecurity work.
Anthropic isn't hiding its frustration. "We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people," the company wrote in a blog post. The U.S. government on Friday ordered Anthropic to immediately shut off access to two of its most powerful AI models - Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 - citing national security concerns.
Anthropic announced on X that it has complied, but it made clear it thinks the government got this one wrong . The directive, which Anthropic said it received on Friday at 5:21 pm ET, forces the company to disable both models for all users worldwide - not just the foreign nationals the government's export control order was nominally aimed at. Access to Anthropic's other models isn't affected.
Mythos is Anthropic's most capable AI model, one the company previewed in early April and has kept tightly restricted ever since because of what Anthropic described as its exceptional ability to find security vulnerabilities in software. According to Anthropic, Mythos identified flaws in every major operating system and web browser it tested, so rather than release it broadly, the company launched a controlled program called Project Glasswing, sharing it with roughly 50 vetted organizations, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike, to use for defensive cybersecurity work. Fable 5, released just three days ago, was Anthropic's answer to the obvious commercial pressure: a version of Mythos fitted with guardrails that block responses in high-risk areas like cybersecurity and biology, making it safe enough for general release, the company argued.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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