The Once And Future Fable #2

On Friday evening the United States Government has forced Anthropic to take down all access to Fable and Mythos. It’s been a rough weekend. Dean W. Ball: One thing about AI regulation being haphazardly imposed on just-released, highly performant models is that in a very real sense, the government just made my world *dumber.* In some impressionistic sense I almost always think this is true of government, but here it is literal. More details have come to light. There remains some fog of war, but we now have a rather good idea why Claude Fable and Mythos were, deeply stupidly, taken down. A narrow jailbreak was discovered, of the type Anthropic warned in advance obviously existed. All demonstrated outputs are things GPT-5.5 can not only produce, but produce without any sort of jailbreak or bypass. The White House demanded Anthropic take down Fable to ‘fix’ the situation, and did not listen when Dario tried to explain that there was no situation to fix. When Anthropic did not do so, the White House hit them with an export restriction that they knew would force Fable and Mythos down for everyone. A lot of nihilists are justifying this decision, and blaming Anthropic, all of whom are very much confirming that they adhere to Dean Ball’s portrait of the United States Government as a dying NPC hospice patient we have to properly placate with the proper vibes and genuflection so they don’t lash out at us. Except they equate this with strength and righteousness, because might makes right, power and vibes. This is a fast developing story with a large speed premium, so I apologize for any errors, and for the structure likely not being ideal. We do the best we can. What we do not know is: What was motivating the government to make these decisions. How deeply they were confused about how any of this works. Whether they demanded and are demanding a narrow fix or a global fix. Narrow fix is probably easy. Global fix is probably impossible. What they intend to do next and what they a