So even if GPT 5.5 is just as capable in these scenarios (which, imo, it largely is), it is not known by the government apparatus as having the same capabilities.
Personally, I think we crossed the threshold of capabilities with Opus 4.6 [2], which translated to an even more capable open-weight GLM 5.1 (which it is rumored to have distilled Opus 4.6) [3][4]. But the USG and its partners aren't fully rational actors with perfect data, so it's possible they're only viscerally aware of these capabilities in the context of Mythos.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/us-security-agency-is-using...
[2]: Opus 4.6 was used for https://www.noahlebovic.com/testing-an-autonomous-hacker/
[3]: See GLM 5.1 scoring in https://www.cybergym.io/cybergym/
[4]: https://dualuse.dev/posts/chinese-models-are-sometimes-bette...
That's what this admin is known for. If you do even what a normal person would think is sane but they don't like it, well now they need to make you bow down and break you so you "learn your lesson".
It doesn't help that they themselves marketed this model as being especially dangerous in the publics hands. If this was just another model drop and none of the fear mongering I don't doubt this probably wouldn't have had any issues.
that is one.
Another is who is going into the first IPO. Troubles for Anthropic IPO would channel all those money into OpenAI's one. Check financial interests of this admin. Hint - they aren't with Anthropic.
Third - most of the export and access controlled tech of the past wasn't productivity multiplier, nor human replacement. AI is a different case - the more capable AI the more its general economic benefit. Export and access control of AI allows you to more and more control the whole domestic and large part of global economy, not just military capabilities like in the past.
Note that specific bug-finding capabilities of a specific model is a red herring here. Other leading models are almost there, and definitely will be there in a month.
Yep. Kushner owns private shares of OpenAI.
Crowdstrike took down airports in July 2024, and its stock was back up by October; it's double the price now. Everyone saw how systemically important it was and how it took down entire industries, and they asked why they weren't using it themselves if it's so important. See also the 2025 cloud outages.
This whole thing shrieks out that Anthropic is at the head of the pack, with the most capable models.
It hardly matters in the customer's mind that today they can't buy this specific model.
It is hard to see being a new benefit for anthropic.
Truly, too big to fail. Capitalism is broken when companies aren't punished but rewarded for screwing up. What point do stock markets serve when bad behavior has no incentives at all to be prevented?!
Troubles for Anthropic would almost certainly affect OpenAI, significantly. Yesterday just proved that the government sees it within their remit to shut down AI models. All current and future AI investment now has to contend with this risk. You should even see the effect of this decision on SPCX on market open despite X.ai being whatever tiny fraction that it is.
The instantaneous instinct to strike an opponent when one can is not much more contemplated than that.
Elon didn't drop millions on the Trump campaign and throw a double Sieg Heil at the 2025 US presidential inauguration because Biden refused a photo-op.
this comparison is orders of magnitude different
I would argue the simple reason is that Amazon wanted to fsck Anthropic to set them back, despite whatever partnership they may claim. The competition at that level is intense and these guys do not play by the same rules that regular people do. They can't flat out murder each other (yet) so they find other ways to do it.
People keep seeking logic where there is non. We have an internet full of theories assuming there is more to it.
It also helps if you bust a few kneecaps in the process to show what happens if you go astray.
It's Anthropic.
This is transparent revenge for them daring to try and push back a little on enabling war crimes.
You can not like that Claude was involved in the planning that led to the murder of a bunch of schoolgirls, but stop playing pretend.
Also, not that it really matters but building a fully autonomous kill bot is not actually a war crime.
Fielding a fully autonomous kill bot is absolutely a war crime under the IHL; specifically, there is no current universe under which a bot can reliably tell a combatant from a non-combatant, or a civilian target from a military target, or act in a proportional manner.
Anthropic wasn't pushing back on enabling war crimes. They said they didn't want the models to work with autonomous weapons because the the models weren't good enough.
Don't be so pessimistic, maybe they're just trying to give their buddy Musk and XAi a chance to catch up.
But I caution you against drawing conclusions from your hypothesis and calling it a day, instead of taking in the available data and using it to broaden your understanding of what's actually happening.
This could be many things: a shakedown, Trump's pettiness, marketing kayfabe, an actual government reaction to a very weaponizable technology, and so on.
But if you call it "just another shakedown" and go about your day, then you're doing yourself a disservice, because the story is still unfolding and we don't have all the facts.
You don't actually have the full story, so don't delude yourself into think you do.
Care to spin the outrage wheel again and lob another unfounded insult at me?
At any rate, feel free to indulge in (plausible) conspiracy theories until further details of the story have emerged.
All of these all surfed in on that very temporal ambiguity, and the fact that we have zero recourse in a plurality of cases - a situation that has eroded over time, not gotten better, and could feasibly be credited with a large part of the palpable social decay that real people are suffering from every day right now.
So what do we do about it? "Indulging in plausible conspiracy theories" could also be read here as "trying to get out ahead of this imminent yet undclear threat"
I don't think the outcome will be particularly unexpected (I assume that Anthropic will have to kiss the ring), but it's not yet clear what the outcome is. I mostly take issue with uninformed people claiming with ignorant confidence that they KNOW exactly what is happening in this scenario, which they, in all likelihood, do not.
So yeah, we all probably know how this will shake out to some degree, but those who claim they KNOW it's a "shakedown like with Tylenol" are just guessing, a.k.a making shit up. This may be part of the usual playbook, but it will likely have its own twists and turns, or could turn out to be something different altogether.
Between the lines: The government's response "seems way out of line with what's actually in the research report," Luta Security CEO Katie Moussouris, who Anthropic shared the Amazon report with, told Axios.
Moussouris said the researchers were able to find security vulnerabilities by asking questions normal defenders would ask AI, which is exactly what the model was intended to do.
An administration official told Axios they do not view other models as national security threats because they do not surpass the bar that Mythos set.
Anything at Mythos level or above would need to go through the administration to ensure the government's national security apparatus is hardened enough, the official added.
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/13/anthropic-amazon-white-hous...
If they actually cared about this issue we’d have predictable laws and regulatory bodies that let companies actually plan
There’s a reason royal fiat doesn’t lead to healthy economies. It’s just confusing and chaotic. It’s not clear why anyone would invest in a new model now.
Then the next administration comes in and instantly, by fiat, they decide to lift the ban. The market just gets jerked around with no ability to plan long term investments.
This administration runs on whims. This is horrifying and there is real harm in this we have yet to see the full repercussions of.
If it had always been the rule of law until now then we would have an apparatus set up to impose checks and balances and accountability on government officials, but because those things have so atrophied from continuous contempt and neglect, no one knows how to demonstrate that what Trump is doing is wrong without also conceding that half of what the government has been doing for decades is wrong. But they also don't want to stop doing those things and therefore have rather a dilemma.
It may be failing, but the problem isn't that those systems weren't put in place.
Laws are supposed to come from Congress, but by volume most rules the public is subject to now come from unelected administrative agencies in the executive branch. That's a clear violation of the separation of powers.
Members of the US Senate, which laws are supposed to have to pass through, which confirm federal judges, and which do the impeachment trials, were originally appointed by the state legislatures, i.e. represented the states, until they were changed to be directly elected. The public's direct representatives were intended to be the House -- and House districts were intended to be small, until the number of seats was capped. So now the states have no representation in the federal government, and neither House districts nor state-wide Senate seats have small enough constituencies for individuals to be meaningfully heard by their representatives.
Juries have the right to do jury nullification and it's one of the most powerful tools against bad laws. If you're on a jury and you think that it's the law which is wrong rather than the defendant's actions, you are not required to convict them. But defendants are essentially prohibited from telling juries that, so it almost never happens. Likewise, the list of procedural safeguards that were meant to protect people against abusive government prosecutions have been eroded to such an extent in the name of expedient mass incarceration that the freedom of any given person is down to the inclination of the government to charge them with something. Which in turn allows the government to govern through threats and demand things they have no right to demand, since they now have the ability to charge anyone with something else if they don't do whatever the government wants, regardless of whether the law requires them to do what they're being pressured to do, or even whether it's constitutionally permissible to make someone do that.
This is all very bad but it's also not new. And it's what enables a tyrant when one comes, which is why it has needed to be fixed for some time now. But the best time to bolster checks and balances is before you remove them and the second best time is very soon.
This is a fact regardless if you like/dislike crypto.
I don't see any evidence that would happen, but this is all speculation by everyone so it really doesn't matter.
In the case of the Trump administration, this thread didn't have specific policies people took issue with but I'd say most likely candidates roll back to issues that I wouldn't want to see the federal government responsible for. Immigration is probably an outlier, though that's a whole can of worms and I disagree with most immigration restrictions in part because of the interplay between immigration and entitlement programs.
Can you give me a consistent principal that that the government of the day is doing outside of flopping around screaming America First while shooting itself in the foot while harassing citizens and critics it deems undesirable? Meanwhile Trump preens about like a pig prancing in front of a mirror and everyone is too weak to publicly acknowledge the farce we have all helped facilitate.
- The immigration policy is nonsensical, incoherent and basically driven by, “I don’t like others”. If it were consistent we would have proper review processes. A respected Somali FIFA referee would not be banned from the US for reasons that apparently cannot be disclosed.
- The AI policy is just based on whatever exec has the right person’s ear as demonstrated by the export controls being enforced on Anthropic’s recent models entirely due to Andy Jassy talking to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
- Onshoring jobs has not moved in any meaningful manner, there is no evidence of this outside of Trump screaming about unproductive and illegal tariffs which he continues to try and argue are not the consumer tax that they are.
- Deconstructing science and practical field work has caused a humanitarian and supply chain disaster. Pest prevention programs are in chaotic states, diseases that the US helped limit worldwide are on the rise, and we have destabilized multiple regions where we used to provide food security which also helped prop up American agriculture.
- There is no crypto policy in the United States. Crypto businesses have spent money trying to stop this. What does crypto actually facilitate? The central bank wasn't created just to annoy people or impede their ability to profit. Should we go back to JP Morgan locking bankers in his personal library and berating them until they agreed to start lending money again?
I largely agree with your criticisms of them. Where I expect we differ is that I would rather remove powers currently granted to them rather than see further federal powers created.
For example, I don't want to see a crypto policy in the US and I'm not aware of what problem it would be solving. If people want to gamble on crypto that's their choice. If they get taken by rug pulls and scams, well that is the result of decisions they made. What I don't want is an ethos expecting the government to know what is best for everyone and force rules upon us because they believe we won't make good decisions and can't or won't be responsible for the outcomes.
Edit: I missed the very end of your comment. No, I don't think we should empower banks to imprison individuals based on unpaid debts. That's already covered though, it isn't legal for a corporation or and individual to imprison a person. Why would we be reverting to such a world?
Anyone who believes in the Unitary Executive Theory likely believes that the President wears imperial robes. The idea that the President should have unchecked power over the executive branch is insane and mocks the whole idea of coequal branches of government or checks and balances.
You can argue for reform, but nothing currently going on is reform. It is entirely running on fumes. The recent AI executive order is representative of this as is the constantly shifting policy driven by whoever has Trump’s favor at any point in time. There's nothing grounding any recent policy change of the United States.
The new law the US is proposing here, is the exact opposite. A kingly appointed adjudicator to decide things.
Liking or not liking has nothing to do with it, this is literally the job of the government. Why do you think states started enacting their own crypto regulation laws (NYDFS) because the administration did 0.
The list goes on and on for things that defy understanding what is happening and what is allowed, you are genuinely not credible.
The industry is infested with scammers, what a great idea to tie the stability of the banking system to it.
> At least with the current you know what is happening and what is allowed.
So you would categorize bribes and North Korean style displays of fealty as a normal part of doing business?
The ideal case is a statutory agency with regulatory authority that sets very clear standards for what model capabilities can and cannot release. Those are set ahead of time and well known by frontier model providers.
Most normal regulations are managed through the administrative procedures act process. That’s a legal requirement that involves deliberation and public comment.
I’d argue you could pretty easily enumerate most capabilities that have been obvious concerns for a while. For example, cyber security.
This structure can last decades and reassure players they can operate in the market without rules changing suddenly without warning.
Some kind of sudden, temporary action like this export control tool is legally fragile. Even if sometimes necessary in exceptional cases. But if the administration sees this as a permanent way of working, they won’t be helping anyone (but maybe themselves through grift).
If the administration truly cares about functional regulation (which maybe they don’t) they need a sturdier legal structure that lasts past Trump. Not flimsy edicts that change with the wind
But yes crazy things happen. Maybe it won’t catch everything.
The right answer are giving the govt / this agency explicit legal, short term model pause capabilities to let the rule making process happen if something completely out of band happens. Or let the agency study/approve models prior to release.
Not sudden, unexpected application of export laws.
Yet in this case, for Fable, cybersecurity risks have been well know for some time. A rule created years ago when we knew this would happen could have given frontier labs and the market predictability.
Is there a jurisdiction that HAS created legislation or regulations that takes it into account? I would think that if it is super easy to foresee and formulate practical and effective regulations for AI, then it must already exist somewhere.
This administration doesn't do regulations, its extortion. Same as the tariffs. Just grease someone's palm and then the vague restriction is lifted.
The USG has limited capabilities on technologies from GPS chips to thermal imaging with "national security" implications for a while and now they're doing it but it seems people don't like how ill defined "Mythos-class" means. Would it be better if it was some %X on some benchmark that the frontier model peddlers could just limbo under to make it "acceptable" for release? Do we just accept that jailbreaking will never be prevented?
The part of all this I do have a problem with is the national state cybersecurity cat-and-mouse this kicks off. Will the US tech landscape have enough time to safely get a "Mythos-class" model to harden itself before China releases or leverages a "Mythos-class" cyber munition?
You expected different with this administration?
I expect that to happen no matter what we do (since the open source models are rapidly catching up), but gating access to the frontier models for a while sounds like a reasonable precaution — as annoying as it is to me personally, to be deprived of such shiny toys!
Fable is a massive step up and I didn't expect it public for another month or two. Something tells me we'll get it back in a few weeks though.
There is no way these systems could be secured in a decade, but I don’t believe they will even try. Knowing developers that have walked those halls, it is not and will not be a priority.
Expect systems to start failing.
If the brakes really were warranted, the administration still screwed up terribly by leaving it out in the open for 3 days. But I'm not aware of any major tragedies in that 3-day window, so I have trouble believing it's really as dangerous as they say.
When it comes to legislative things, there is pretty much always a timeline in which to become compliant. I do wonder if there was opportunity to give warning etc. but Anthropic decided to perform an immediate full stop deliberately causing the metaphorical three-car pileup, because the more painful for the users, the more pressure from the people there will be on the government to undo this.
See also: those painfully annoying cookie banners that are malicious compliance in the most irritating way possible, which GDPR does not require, in order to make people think GDPR is dumb.
Are you referring to Selective Availability? That ended decades ago.
Seeing as neither Mythos nor GPT-5.5 had been pre-trained with a particular focus on cybersecurity, this would have to mean any model that benchmarks better than GPT-5.4 or Opus 4.6 on these tasks cannot be used by None-US-Citizens. If such guidance isn't enforced for all US labs, I think that's irrefutable evidence that this isn't about cybersecurity or "the bar that Mythos set"...
[0] https://xcancel.com/AISecurityInst/status/205458976317312633...
I am, thus far, not aware of 5.5-Cyber managing anything similar to "Project Glasswing"
That said, the government also knew about Mythos since Project Glasswing was announced... April 7th, two months ago, so if they wanted to block a public release, they had more than enough time to do it in an orderly way.
And basically every sign that Mythos is well above the previous baseline was pretty publicly known by early May, when we started getting stuff like the Firefox bug reports.
I can see an argument that Mythos is just barely a "cut above" enough to regulate, but I cannot see any argument for doing this by a fiat order three days after the release.
Anyway you guys are trying to extrapolate reason and fairness from politics and bureaucratic logic. Amazon concerns even if unfunded triggered US Gov action which demanded Anthropic to pause Fable. Anthropic didn't comply and is being made an example via export restriction.
This is not at all surprising. And I hope people don't make the mistake that it's a "this administration" problem.
It was obviously from the early days of these LLMs that the shoe was going to drop and we (as Joe public) would not retain access. I mean that once ChatGPT3 dropped it was clear there was some level of functionality at which we would be denied further access.
The only carve out will be as per older technical innovations the US is more concerned with foreign national access than US citizen access at home.
I don't remember the details with encryption but it was basically you have to ship a breakable version for the rest of the world, and you generally sometimes ship a backdoored version.
And Anthropic is more concerned by what they are asked to do to US citizens than the broader group.
Same story with encryption, CPUs, GPUs, blah blah blah.
> This is not at all surprising. And I hope people don't make the mistake that it's a "this administration" problem.
I do remember the details: the result of Bernstein v. United States was that you have a First Amendment right to publish code because it is a speech act and so the USGOV cannot prevent you from publishing effective encryption algorithms. Will model weights be afforded the same protection? What about serving a model without publishing its weights? We shall see.
Giving access to 'citizens', with the current way the Internet operates, is absurd. One back door into a desktop, workstation, and 'validated citizens' are now 'hackers from where-ever'.
Yes, because knowledge is power, and information is meant to be free.
They own 20% of Anthropic.
Anthropic bleeds cash. They have to raise capital.
There are only 2 ways: an IPO or follow-ons from existing investors.
If the IPO gets delayed because of these restrictions, Anthropic will be forced to raise more capital from existing investors.
And existing investors (Amazon) will end up owning more of Anthropic at a cheaper valuation.
- Amazon's CEO knew what he was doing and the possible consequences
- Anthropic must raise cash, and there are only 2 ways: an IPO or follow-ons
- If the IPO is blocked, existing investors will be able to increase their stake on Anthropic at a very attractive lower valuation
- Amazon has 20% of Anthropic: so, they benefit from it
When it comes to highly technical, fast moving developments like frontier AI and blue team / red team perspectives, I could see any CEO getting out over their skis. Now mix in some incompetent Trump admin officials, including apparently Howard Lutnick. I am guessing many of these people don't understand the subject matter very well at all.
This is Amazon prioritizing their 100% stake in AWS over their 20% stake in Anthropic. It's also possible that Amazon knows things that are not public.
The fact that Amazon is willing to report this despite owning shares in Anthropic and being close to a liquidation event points to whatever they found being actually serious.
But then it backfired spectacularly and now it seems they can't use Mythos currently
Will Chinese models be allowed on the market… at all? Will startups be banned from training models of equivalent capacity?
"Mythos Preview scrambled the global cybersecurity landscape. But its broader significance is that it proves beyond doubt that AI models are now tools of global and national strategic consequence."
"The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks. This power must be scoped to the above four specific risks and there must be protective measures against political favoritism or arbitrary decisions"
A third-party demonstrated that it was possible to jailbreak the safety measures of Fable to access the raw Mythos abilities. Abilities which Anthropic say are too dangerous for the public.
Edit. From David Sacks:
— A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused.
— In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious".Pressure test this assumption before getting behind this position.
That,
A. Anthropic solved the llm jailbreak problem with mythos (despite no claim to have done so on their part)
B. That a full jailbreak of mythos is possible.
Anthropic’s claims are as follows if you read their post:
* this is not a universal jailbreak method
* the jailbreak affords you the same capabilities you get already with other models, not Mythos.
In this situation it’s which party do you trust more and history would suggest this administration is very playful with the truth, especially when it comes to economically damaging the company that’s become their political enemy
There is information, from Anthropic, concerning the jailbreaks that motivated this action, that directly contradicts the statement.
There is just an absence of information backing the statement I responded to.
I find it so odd this is apparently so contentious a take.
Put another way, the thing we are all concerned with is the complete circumvention of safeguards that is normally possible with llms. If you _aren't_ arguing that this isn't possible, you're not engaging in discussing the the thing that is concerning to regulators or those discussing the regulation.
The latter portion is grand standing about how incredulous the commenter is that someone might trust an LLM company about the strength of their harnesses' if-then-else statements for request routing.
Why bother with an unsubstantial comment?
Now you add the word "complete". Anthropic IS arguing _complete_ circumventing is NOT possible.
Yes, and rape victims are "asking for it" by wearing short skirts. I thought we stopped with this nonsense a couple decades ago?
There's a huge difference between "we want regulation", and the government swinging it's dick at random.
If the government had said, a week ago, don't release Fable? That wouldn't have gotten nearly this reaction. And the government has known that these capabilties exist since they were announced TWO MONTHS AGO.
And before someone calls this an ad hominem, it isn’t; I am not saying he is bad or morally wrong or anything else (you are free to think that or not, as am I).
But Sacks has skin in the game. And that makes him both unreliable and partial.
I wondering where you are getting the idea that there is an sane regulation right now?
And? Does it matter?
Having no moat, they want to manipulate the government into creating one for them.
David Sacks is publicly gloating about it: https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2065853007619588171
I can't really say that Anthropic didn't get what they deserved. They exploited security threats to sell their product and play political games, and now their rivals are rubbing it in their faces.
I agree with this
> David Sacks is publicly gloating about it: https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2065853007619588171
I do no like David Sacks but how do you say this is gloating about it?
Again, I do believe this is political, but Sacks is saying "you said this is dangerous and wanted regulation, and we believe you. Fix this because it's dangerous and we'll let it out again".
How is this gloating?
he is emphasizing that they used their own words against them. everyone knows the security threat is a pretext. the message is that he is smart and they are stupid and he won, which is what I call gloating.
> "Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong."
an obvious lie, which is inserted to emphasize that it is a lie. when you purposefully lie, not to deceive, but with the intent that the counter-party knows you are lying and must accept the lie, that is an assertion of power.
Virtually every debater is gloating by that measure.
In this case, the govt used Anthropic's word in the way Anthropic wanted them to.
Anthropic has publicly stated that AI is too powerful and needs to be regulated. They've done this repeatedly. More recently, they've withheld releasing Mythos claiming that it's not safe.
Sacks isn't using Anthropic's words against them. He's more or less doing what they asked!
i dont see how it effects them negatively at all given their opus models are already on par or exceed any other model out there.
Does anyone know what limits Fable 5 has overstepped in the eyes of the government? Parameter count? Certain benchmark results? Training computer?
Cause if it’s just the ability to assist with cyberattacks and being jailbreakable, there is no model previously released that isn’t equally guilty.
Remember that for GPT 5.5 and 5.4, OpenAI also restricted the cybersecurity focused use under designated models, otherwise rerouting to 5.3-codex like Fable did with Opus 4.8. And both OpenAI models can also be jailbroken all the same.
Basically, what was the reason to tell the government now and not with Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.4? sama has been doing the rounds with apocalyptic predictions…