The Fable Ban's Unintended Consequences + AI's New Economics — With Aaron Levie

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:26)
Aaron Levie is the CEO of Box. He's one of the most insightful and fun voices on the future of this technology. He actually was the fourth guest ever on Big Technology Podcast and the guest, the only other time we did a live podcast together. So with that, I am thrilled to welcome Aaron Levie. Please join me in welcoming him.
All right, great to see you.

**Aaron Levie** (0:50)
Good to see you, thank you.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:52)
Let's dive right into it. I'm going to start, again, since you're not at one of the labs, let's start to talk about the biggest, most controversial moment now, which is the Anthropic Fable situation.
Let me put to you what I call the Jassy mystery. So what we know about-

**Aaron Levie** (1:09)
I'm sure he likes that name.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:10)
Well, he didn't show up, so we can talk about it in this absence. So what we know about the Fable ban or the export controls on Anthropic is that Amazon found a vulnerability in the software, and Andy Jassy maybe made a call to Dario, definitely made a call to the White House, and then very soon afterwards, there were export controls that were put on Anthropic's frontier model.

**Aaron Levie** (1:35)
Those two fact patterns are probably not ideal.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:38)
So the mystery is why did he do that? And here's one hypothesis. This is from Chamoff. He said, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta now have a serious non-zero opportunity to tank the frontier labs. Go to the government, kneecap the labs motion of putting the latest models out into the wild, become the trusted gatekeeper between labs and the public by having the labs go through their clouds.

**Aaron Levie** (2:02)
Okay.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (2:03)
Plausible?

**Aaron Levie** (2:06)
I would say, I mean, anything's plausible.
I prefer Occam's razor on this one, which is, you know, ever since Mythos, you know, Mythos very clearly was this event that basically said, you know, AI is obviously getting super powerful. It has all these risks associated with it. We are going to give it to some, you know, small trusted partner network. They're going to go evaluate their own tools. They're going to evaluate these capabilities. There's been a lot of sort of, it's a very kind of dramatic, you know, kind of rollout of a technology. And I think what that has done is it's created this flywheel where it almost incentivizes even more drama and more research and more depth in, you know, security being the primary space in a way that we could have already been doing since GPT-4 if we wanted. Like you can go and deploy these things to go find lots of vulnerabilities. You can use them offensively or defensively. But Mythos kind of created that extra air of seriousness and uncertainty around it for good reason, because it's an incredibly powerful model. So I go with Occam's Razor, which is Amazon obviously has security research teams. They're like, any company at that scale, we try and test and push the limits of models. In our particular domain of use cases, clearly at Amazon scale, you have a very large security team. They're trying to jailbreak models all the time. So almost by definition, there's already a public-private partnership on all forms of jailbreaking models, trying to push them to the limits. As a part of that, and especially with the surrounding atmosphere of Mythos, I think it would be very natural for Andy to either share that research or his team to share that research, and that escalates and then that sort of creates its own flywheel. But the idea that there's some kind of boardroom-level strategy meeting that says, we now need to co-opt the technology, become the only interface to the government, this kind of puts us in the pole position, I think it's less likely that and more likely this is a situation where the Mythos momentum continued. Fable obviously had ways of getting back to the Mythos level of capability, and researchers sort of shared that information, and I think there's a basically very limited, small percentage chance that then Andy and team knew that the very next event would be, they'd stop the model, and that's not even good for Amazon, like strategically, like Amazon makes plenty of money the more that Fable gets used in the world. So I don't think you would do some kind of maneuvering to create this. I kind of just go with, this is, it's a very chaotic kind of environment right now. The government has only a few tools at their disposal at any given time to deploy against these things. Those are going to be kind of blunt instruments.