The United States of Claude: Government Bans Fable 5

**Ejaaz** (0:00)
Last Tuesday, Anthropic released the most powerful AI model the world has ever seen. And that exact same week, by Friday at 5:21 PM, they received a letter from the government asking them to shut down access to their latest Claude Fable and Claude Mythos models. Ninety minutes later, Anthropic shut down access for everyone, citing that anyone who isn't an American citizen or American by nature doesn't get access to this model. Now, the official reason for this was security researchers external to Anthropic discovered a jailbreak, a way to access or bypass the safeguards on Anthropic's Fable model to get access to a restricted version, which could be used for nefarious purposes, such as designing dangerous bioweapons or exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses in software. Now, in the hands of the wrong people, this could be potentially dangerous, such as China versus the US. The craziest part about all of this is it came from an internal partner. Amazon, who owns the largest individual stake in Anthropic as an investor, were the ones that released details to the jailbreak to the government. They had the option of picking up the phone and calling Dario and saying, hey, there's a jailbreak, let's figure out how to fix this. But they decided to contact Trump himself and report this. So it unpacks and unravels this entire story around governments taking a nationalized stake in the frontier AI labs and determining who gets access to which model.

**Josh** (1:16)
Last week was a roller coaster of a week. I mean, we got Fable 5 finally. The Mythos class model was delivered on Tuesday. And Friday at 521 p.m., after everyone is getting ready to go home, the US government drops this notice on their desk, saying that they are initiating an export control directive, citing national security authorities. The order was to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside of the United States, including Anthropics own foreign national employees. This, of course, is almost impossible to enforce. How do you tell where anyone is from? So, Anthropics says there's no clean way to wall off foreign nationals across global consumer products. So, in order to comply, they disabled models for all customers, both Mythos and Fable class models. Following this, they also shared the initiative with AWS, which revoked Fable 5, all of their cloud services. And now where we sit today, everybody is using Opus 4.8 and Sonnet models because Fable and Mythos are no longer allowed to be used. This sucks.
I was getting really used to using Fable as a model. It is an unbelievably remarkable model in terms of how powerful it is. And it feels like now, I woke up today, I went to use Cloud and being faced with Opus 4.8, I'm like, oh man, like it's a good model, but I really miss my Crown Jewel. I miss, I feel like I am less capable today than I was yesterday. And that feeling alone kind of sucks.

**Ejaaz** (2:39)
We've crossed a very important boundary and it's the first time we've ever done this. This is the first instance of an AI model which has been publicly released and then withdrawn.
And I'm feeling the withdrawal effects. As you know, I've been using Fable 24-7 since it got released. And when it got pulled, I think it was out on a Friday night and I saw the news. And that was the other thing, by the way, this happened at the end of day, at the end of the week when no one was expecting it.

**Josh** (3:05)
We got a lot of complaints to get into about this one.

**Ejaaz** (3:07)
Yeah, there's a lot of complaints that I have and that I'm sure many other people have. But the point is, this is the first clear example of a retail accessible model being pulled. And it was government determined. And so it brings into question, obviously, a host of different topics and discussions. But the main one being, is the government overreach too much? Is this aligned too far? And then it gets into an interesting discussion around who gets access to this, right? So the clear statement that's been made by the government is, if you aren't an American citizen or other, if you aren't American, if you weren't born here, you don't get access to this model. So technically on this show, Josh, that would mean that you get access, there's a world where you get access to this model and future models, and I don't purely because of nationality-based stuff. So it gets into a bunch of different things that I have some pretty strong opinions on. But firstly, one earth is an export control. What does that mean exactly?