The Fable 5 Crisis Continues

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, as the work week starts without resolution, the Fable 5 crisis continues. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
Welcome back to The AI Daily Brief. Today, we are picking up where we left off, in the chaotic saga of Anthropic versus the White House around Fable 5
For those just getting up to speed, on Friday night, the United States issued an export control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to any foreign nationals. Given the breadth of that order, the only choice that Anthropic had in their estimation was to take the model down entirely. Now, the first phase, in the absence of better information, was stunned reactions and everyone casting about for who to blame. And while there might have been some partisans for either the Anthropic side or the US government side, candidly no one was looking all that great. I did an emergency episode on Saturday morning, and subsequent to that, we started to get a little bit more information, both in the form of narrative construction as well as in the form of reporting. The first important post came from former AIsR David Sachs who wrote, I've had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic and here is what I believe to be true. As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under a commercial named Fable. Fable is Mythos with guardrails, but if those guardrails fail, then you've exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn't have them. Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyber weapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability, big or small, it is Anthropic's responsibility to patch. A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the US government who is testing Fable came forward with the jailbreak of these 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 in the US government 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 cyberweapon could be defined as not serious. In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety. In reaction, the admin issued the export control. The admin did this reluctantly. It's been very surprised that Anthropic hasn't wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request, i.e. fixing the jailbreak issue. Anthropic's reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research company. The admin's hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn't wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority. Finally, those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DOW, Anthropic issues are wrong. The admin values Anthropic's technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic's court.
Now, everyone saw that, everyone shared it, and everyone had something to say about it. There were some who took sacks at face value, there were many more who viewed this as an act of narrative construction more than anything else.
And some were just outright sceptical entirely. AI entrepreneur Eric Voorhees responded, More likely story. The jailbreak wasn't super serious, a situation anyone who has ever received bug reports is familiar with. Anthropic thought the demand to halt the model was absurd, and the federal government used the opportunity to punish and humiliate Anthropic for the prior sins of not bending the knee. Anthropic has more credibility on such topics than Washington.
Now, if we take sacks post as the modern day equivalent of a press release, there are a few things worth noting.
First, sacks in numerous cases paints Anthropic as hypocritical, not only in that they re the safety company and not taking a safety issue seriously, but that they had marketed Mythos Weapon as a cyber weapon and then were surprised when it needed to be regulated as such.
Sacks paints the administration as being reluctant to kneecap Anthropic, and in my estimation, paints two ways out of the situation. The first is in that second to last line. The admin feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. This is basically saying, the ball is in Anthropic's court. In other words, Anthropic resolve this and we can move on. So what's the second way out of this? I don't think it should pass our notice. When Sacks stops talking about Anthropic and starts specifically talking about Dario Amadei himself, the admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreaker, de-deploy the model. Dario refused. Now, so far, no calls from the administration for Dario's resignation have come, although certainly that's been a subtext of some investor conversations and one strand of discourse on the internet. But by specifically targeting out Dario, I do think Sachs is at least a little bit setting him up as a potential sacrificial lamb.