Why the Anthropic Export Ban Should Worry the Crypto Industry

**Ram Ahluwalia** (0:00)
Now, most IPOs, including blockbuster IPOs, including, say, Coinbase, including Circle, which we saw last year, including Meta, they tend to decline, and it's a very clear and significant effect, especially as you start to get closer and closer to these unlocks. Elon now has over a trillion dollars net worth. There's a story there also, but this is a bad, bad investment. It is not a great idea. You should recognize that sometime in the next couple of weeks or months, again, as the unlock comes online, this thing is going to go down.

**Austin Campbell** (0:46)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Bits and Bips, where we explore how crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time.
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**Austin Campbell** (2:21)
All right, welcome back. And as always, I'm your host, Austin Campbell, High Scholar of Zero Knowledge Group. Here with my co-hosts, Ram Ahluwalia, Maester of Wealth, Leader of Lumida, Chris Perkins, the Golden Hand of 250 Digital, and Sam Enzer, the Warden of CahillNXT.
For those of you who don't know Sam, by the way, you should, he is one of the lawyers deep into the crypto world, and has thought about these things for a long time. Today though, we're gonna 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** (4:58)
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 assets 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? 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 just taking a step back here, we know that Mythos is extremely powerful and was in many ways marketed as something too hot to touch, right? So dangerous.