Why Andy Jassy Sounded the Anthropic Alarm, Meta's ‘Tokenminimizing’, & Xbox Spin-Out Plans

**Akash Pasricha** (0:13)
Welcome everyone to The Informations TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Monday, June 15th. We are here in our New York studio where we are celebrating the New York Knicks Championship. This morning, we are also watching a couple of big deals. Fox is acquiring Roku for $22 billion. It is yet another media consolidation move. The $160 share price is the highest that Roku would be trading since the pandemic era. And in other deal news, Salesforce is buying AI customer service firm Fin for $3.6 billion.
We'll talk about that shortly with our AI reporter. On today's show, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has sounded the alarm over Anthropic and Fable 5 that is according to exclusive reporting from The Information. We are going to bring on Stephanie Palazzolo, author of AI Agenda in just a second to break that down for us. We'll also talk about our Meta news, that Meta is considering a move here to curb AI usage among employees. We've also got our Microsoft reporter joining us shortly to discuss his scoop that the company has been thinking about spinning out Xbox.
I'm going to close out the show with two founders coming on. We've got GPU infrastructure company, Hydra Host, coming on to talk about their funding round, and we will talk with Abridge co-founder and CEO, Dr. Shiv Rao, about his new play with Nvidia. It's going to be a fun show, so let's get right on into it.
Fable 5 had quite the U-turn after its impressive release. The Trump Administration issued new export restrictions on the model. Anthropic, as a result, disabled the model entirely. My colleagues over the weekend caught wind of the behind-the-scenes discussions that led to that decision, and I want to bring on Stephanie Palazzolo to share with us what she found out. Steph, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here.

**Stephanie Palazzolo** (2:10)
Thanks. Great to be here.

**Akash Pasricha** (2:11)
Okay. So Fable 5 comes out. Everyone is trumpeting about how good it is. We caught wind of a discussion that Andy Jassy may have had with folks in the government. What do we find?

**Stephanie Palazzolo** (2:26)
Yeah. So as you mentioned, this weekend was a bit of a crazy one for Anthropic.
Essentially, you know, on Friday, the Trump Administration said that the company would have to cut off access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, which are Anthropic's two most advanced models to foreign nationals. And then in response, Anthropic basically shut down access to the models for everyone because, you know, it's very hard for the company to tell who is and isn't a foreign national accessing the models, not to mention that there are a ton of those within the company itself actually working on the models. So as some of my colleagues and I reported over the weekend, a lot of this stemmed actually initially from a conversation that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with senior Trump officials, Trump Administration officials, where he essentially kind of flagged some jail breaks and other security related concerns that he had to the officials from the government, which then kind of snowballed into what we saw on Friday with Anthropic at the end of the day having to cut off access to everyone.

**Akash Pasricha** (3:37)
So do we know any more details about this conversation between Andy Jassy and the Trump Administration, or is the extent of what we know just that it happened?

**Stephanie Palazzolo** (3:47)
So there are definitely different details floating around about the conversations. Essentially, what we have gathered from ours and other outlet stories is it seems like Andy was basically flagging a jailbreak that Amazon researchers had found, and what a jailbreak is, is essentially a way for a user of a model to bypass the guardrails on the model. So in this case, CloudFable 5 has guardrails that prevent users from asking cybersecurity related questions, since that's an area that the model is especially good in.
Anthropic was worried that users would use this model to come up with ways to hack websites and software floating out there. And so it sounds like basically Amazon found a jailbreak that worked to get around those guardrails and flagged this to Trump Administration officials. Now it's not really clear how much Andy Jassy expected this to escalate. It's totally possible that he was just flagging this as something to look out for and had no idea that it was going to reach the point that it did where now you see Anthropic basically cutting off access to these models for everyone.

**Akash Pasricha** (5:02)
And it is kind of an interesting dynamic here because Amazon, of course, is a big investor in Anthropic.