Anthropic's AI Got Shut Down by the Government

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**Jason Howell** (1:00)
Coming up next, Jeff Jarvis and I make sense of how Anthropic's most powerful AI models ended up offline after a 90-minute government deadline. Also, SpaceX hits $2 trillion with its record-setting IPO and immediately buys Cursor for $60 billion, although we saw that one coming, and AR Glasses from Snap, that is Snapchat, Snap, and Xreal, the ones that I've seen before. You can finally buy those this fall. We've got some new information there. Allbirds officially an AI company now. More details there. We have so much coming on this episode of the AI Inside Podcast.
Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of AI Inside, the show where we take a look at the AI that is layered throughout the world of technology. The AI world keeps turning. The globe keeps spinning, I suppose, in the world of AI. I'm one of your hosts, Jason Howell. Joined, as always, on the other side of the country by Jeff Jarvis. Good to see you, Jeff.

**Jeff Jarvis** (2:12)
Hey, boss, good to see you.

**Jason Howell** (2:14)
Yeah, absolutely.

**Jeff Jarvis** (2:14)
So the globe is layered and spins.

**Jason Howell** (2:18)
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know where I was going with that.

**Jeff Jarvis** (2:22)
I don't know.

**Jason Howell** (2:24)
You start digging into the ground, you see all the different layers of AI that take us right to the core.

**Jeff Jarvis** (2:29)
Pre-Cambrian layer of AI.

**Jason Howell** (2:31)
Yeah, it's exactly the planet Earth. Good to see you.

**Jeff Jarvis** (2:36)
Good to see you.

**Jason Howell** (2:37)
Lots to talk about as usual.

**Jeff Jarvis** (2:39)
Since we last spoke.

**Jason Howell** (2:41)
Yes, I know. Kind of like, what happened here? What the heck is going on? We got the Anthropic, Mythos, Fable, debacle, saga, whatever you want to call it, happening and boy, did it happen. I have to say because I was getting so used to having access to Fable, and I was starting to really understand how I was going to get maximum benefit out of it before it like the payment kind of thing switched and it went away and then I'd have to pay a bunch for it. So I had kind of mapped out my approach, like what I wanted to do with it.
Then as we know, poof.

**Jeff Jarvis** (3:22)
Was there an error message? Was there a, sorry folks, we have to tell you we've been banned? Or how did you, or it just didn't work?

**Jason Howell** (3:29)
So I didn't, I didn't initially see the news. I went into the Cloud app to use, to start using it. And my app still had Fable in the toggle. It was still kind of selected by default because I had been working with it the last time I had used the app. And so I put in my prompt and everything. And then it just kind of gave me a quick error message when I tried to run it through. And I was like, oh, that's, that's weird. Well, I'll just try it again, you know? And I tried it a couple more times. And then I was like, hmm, let's go to Tech Meme and see what's going on here. And sure enough, I went to Tech Meme and saw that everything was upside down.
It had, you know, launched on the 9th, which we had talked about last week. We discussed this three days after it launched. This is Friday, June 12th, last Friday in the evening, 5:20 p.m. Pacific anyways. I think it was p.m. Pacific. Anthropic gets a letter apparently from the Commerce Department. The letter says that Anthropic needs to suspend all access to Fable 5, to Mythos 5 for those who had access to that, by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States. And the government, it turns out over time, we've been getting like all this extra information. So feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on any of the sequencing or whatever, Jeff. But it sounds like they had about 90 minutes to comply with this. They looked at that, basically said, well, we can't filter out foreign nationals from American users. We can't do that in real time anyway. So they effectively just pulled both of those models offline for everyone. Poof, went away. Jason was sad because he couldn't do the work he wanted to do.