No good policy gets announced shortly after 5pm eastern on a Friday.

Here we go again.

The Once And Future Fable

The United States Department of Commerce, as per a letter from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, apparently in response to a narrow jailbreak identified by Amazon, has classified Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as being subject to US export controls. That explicitly means cutting off access to all ‘foreign nationals,’ even within the United States, even if they are Anthropic employees.

Given Anthropic has no means to verify citizenship at this time, that meant complete shutdown of the model, at least for the time being.

Anthropic: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.

Dean W. Ball: I can’t tell if this is lawfare against Anthropic in particular [...]

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Outline:

(00:16) The Once And Future Fable

(07:42) This Action And Its Implementation Are Absurdly Stupid

(09:58) David Sacks Offers The Official Steelman

(16:50) Could Anthropic Offer A Technical Way Out?

(17:41) The Problem

(18:47) The Other Way Out

(19:13) UK AISI

(19:56) Warning Shots Fired

(21:09) Well Did You Lead Him On? What Were You Wearing?