Et tu, Jassy?

**Brian** (0:00)
Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to The Daily AI Show. Today is June 15th, 2026 And you're watching us live. If you're with us, thanks for everybody joining in the comments. With me today are Andy and Beth, and I'm Brian. I think it's the three of us. We'll see if anybody else pops in the door. You never know when Gareth might be available or otherwise. So, but for now, this is who you got, and we're happy to kick off yet another week. And this is one of those weekends where stuff happened even after the Friday hour. Sometimes we have some crazy stuff that happens on the weekends with different models and different news and stuff. This particular news, and I'm sure we want to at least get everybody up to date on, although, well, we're in the AI bubble. I think all of our audience is probably in the AI bubble. So I don't think this is new news, but this happened at 521 p.m. on Friday. So definitely after the sort of East Coast work week time ended.
It's something that probably a lot of people are already aware of, and we'll get into the details here, but the highlights are that Fable, slash, Mythos were basically ordered by the US government to be taken down. There's some nuances in there that we can certainly talk about, but the end result of it was that none of us have access currently to it. If you go into Claude Code, there's just a line at the bottom that says Fable 5 is not available. Click here to learn more. More annoyingly, you can't exit out once you've read that and be like, go away, I don't want to see you anymore. I know I don't have Fable right now in Claude Code, but it's permanently stuck to the bottom. If you have been using Claude, if you just generally follow the news because it was a big news item over the weekend or on Friday, this was what happened.
Now, we can get into the details. I don't know if anybody else wants to pick it up. I do have some perplexity notes here just to keep me honest because there's been more developments over the weekend and I don't know, do we have a new super villain now? Do we have somebody coming in from Amazon, ruffling feathers and doing some interesting stuff? I think that's probably even the more interesting part of this story. But before I just go off on that, because it's just sort of the intro, Andy, Beth, where do you guys want to jump in with this one? Do one of you want to run with this? Like I said, I have the notes of what's happened.
But it's some interesting developments here for sure. And also I would say there's some precedents being set here for sure. Nothing like this has ever really happened. So lots of people are trying to scramble and figure out what does this mean going forward.

**Beth** (2:34)
So one of the things that I noticed that is also, this administration needs more handholding, right? Thank you for the opportunity.
We're blessed to be part of the thing. Like we've seen that play out with other things that leaders in this administration have had meetings about, right? Like that's just, you can go and look at the videos. But this does seem to be a player in this, right? Andy Jassy did call up Bessent, maybe? Is that who we talked to initially?

**Brian** (3:28)
I'll give you the...

**Beth** (3:30)
But it was like a...

**Brian** (3:31)
Yeah, the US Department, yes.

**Beth** (3:35)
It was like, hey, I'm the big guy at Amazon and you're the big guy over here. We're going to talk directly on the phone, which is a power move, right?
So it seemed, I mean, I'm not naïve enough to think that power doesn't play into any regulation ever, but it does seem to be more overt in this particular case. That's my sense.

**Andy** (4:03)
So the implication there is that there was some desire or maybe just the idea of taking advantage of an opportunity by Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, to cast some shade on Anthropic. But that doesn't fit with the fact that Anthropic is as Amazon is a major investor.

**Brian** (4:29)
Yes.
13 billion major.
Not a small amount. Not to mention, like seats on boards and Anthropic. Like Amazon Anthropic, well, all of them play. Well, everybody has hands in pockets of competitors. You can look at that, look at Apple using, paying, or Google, yeah, Apple paying Google one billion a month just to be able to use the Gemini models, Siri, right? Competitors, but also working together. We've seen Google invest, also invested 13 billion into Anthropic. We don't talk about that a lot, but that happened. Amazon did as well early on. Amazon has a seat on the board of Anthropic. This is very interesting. Now, I don't know how much of this is like, this is like multiple outlets reporting kind of story, right? Because I don't know if we still know the whole story here, but according to reports from outlets like the Wall Street Journal, the Information Policy Blogs, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy discussed Anthroponyx models with senior US officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bissett. There you go. I couldn't find his name. Those conversations reportedly helped prompt the Commerce Export Letter. Now, that's the letter just to rewind for anybody who missed this over the weekend. I get it, by the way. This was big news or whatever. You may be listening to this show, but also understand that people have other lives going on and you just might not have been plugged into the news. You might be like, what happened? Where and what model? You may even be thinking to yourself, I imagine we have a lot of people listening to the show. We were thinking like I hadn't even really had a chance to write on Fable or even use it or I heard you guys talk about it last week, but it was just last week. Understood on all that and that's why I just want to make sure that like, here's what happened and then here's what we know so far. I'll give you a quick brief rundown on this for anybody who doesn't. As I mentioned earlier, there was a letter, a call, I think a direct call and a direct letter, to the CEO of Anthropic from the US Commerce Departments. What was his name? Did we just say? I just had it in my head. He's the Treasury Secretary. A direct call and basically the outcome of that call, which was basically from what we understand, Jassy, CEO of Amazon, saying, hey, we believe we have jailbroken to a certain extent, Fable or Mythos, it's a security threat, and I'm not sure what else was said by that point, but we believe it's a security threat, which then invoked this message. To comply Anthropic, what it said was all foreign nationals inside and outside the US on national security grounds. But even though that was the message from the Commerce Department, there's no way to independently verify who's using Fable or Mythos. The only thing Anthropic could do in order to comply immediately was actually just disable it for everybody, because it would be no way to unmix it. As they mentioned many times, there's people who work literally for Anthropic who are foreign, and so they technically were not allowed to have access at this point. The government said no. Anthropic said, look, we can't. There's no way to do that, everybody doesn't get access. We're restricting everybody, which is, I would imagine, the right move.