Why Sam Enzer Says the Fable 5 Ban Should Worry Crypto

**Austin Campbell** (0:00)
Today, though, we're going to start talking about the Fable 5 ban. So what's going on?
The US government issued an export control directive citing national security concerns, suspending all access to Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national. That includes Anthropic's own foreign national employees, forcing Anthropic to abruptly disable both models worldwide for all customers. All other Anthropic models are currently unaffective, but Anthropic received the directive at 521 PM Eastern previously, and the government's concern was stated to be a jailbreaking of Fable 5
So let's talk about Anthropic first.
They said the demonstrated technique for jailbreaking found, quote, a small number of previously known minor vulnerabilities. Other publicly available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass, and they named OpenAI's GPT 5.5. They also said, quote, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. It would essentially halt all new model deployment for all frontier model providers. Now, on the other hand, the administration's case, and this was David Sachs, said, quote, 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. The admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused. Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety and the ball is in Anthropic's court. Now, acknowledging up front that we don't have a full story from either side and we're still trying to figure out what's going on. I wanted to start, Sam, in particular with you, because I know you've dealt with crypto and seen administrative actions previously. How are you taking this whole thing apart? What do you think here?

**Sam Enzer** (2:09)
Sure. Great question, Austin. Austin, Ram and Chris, thanks for having me on. So this is an interesting... We're in an administration that has been, in many ways, a huge friend to the digital asset sector and to the AI industry, looking... And the president has made clear he wants to remove red tape and make America the capital for crypto, for AI, for tech in the world, and to create the kind of regulatory environment that will attract entrepreneurs to build here and disseminate their products, right? And we are in, for AI, we're in a race against China in many respects. And in the blockchain industry, there are many projects that integrate AI with crypto, integrate AI with DeFi, and regardless have some of the basic tech infrastructure that could be regulated by export controls. So how do I take it? On the one hand, I think because this administration has been so friendly to the tech industry, and you have the statement from David Sacks about why. You can imagine that, you know, just taking a step back here, we know that Mythos is extremely powerful and was in many ways marketed as something so, you know, too hot to touch, right? So dangerous.
Fable is supposed to have safeguards, and you could imagine according to the reports, and I don't know if these are true, but what I've seen in the press is there's reporting that Amazon's CEO told the administration there was a jailbreak, in other words, a way around the safeguards, and 24 or 48 hours later, you've got this 521 p.m. Friday night directive not to export it. So on the one hand, you can understand as a human who may be concerned about national security, why the administration would react this way. On the other hand, as somebody who has lived through what I'll call the Howie Gensler wars, watching, not necessarily this administration, but government officials take ambiguous regulations or ambiguous statutory authority and then use it to crush developers, innovators, and businesses. It is concerning when the government has the power to effectively ban the dissemination of software, of ideas. There is well-established case law that source codes, software, including encryption software, is literally speech, is literally protected speech under the First Amendment.
Here we have not... Some of the things that are concerning about this, and that's not to say the government doesn't have a valid basis, but there's a question of what's the substantive basis, and then there's a question of the process. Here, we don't have, as the public, we don't have much process. The letter that was reportedly sent by the Commerce Department to Anthropic has not been publicly released. We have a description of it from Anthropic, but we don't know what it says. We don't know what the concerns were, what the national security concerns reportedly or allegedly were. We don't know what the statutory or regulatory authority for it was.