Decision on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models means the U.S. has a licensing regime for frontier AI—it just doesn’t want to admit it

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…Anthropic scrambles to try to reverse U.S. export controls on its Fable and Mythos models…the U.S. government decision on Anthropic’s models causes panic in Europe over AI sovereignty and delight among China’s open source AI developers…Open AI’s finances revealed…a new benchmark shows AI agents may not be as capable as you think…and courts are turning to AI for transcripts but the reasons may not be what you think. This week’s biggest news is obviously the U.S. government’s decision to impose export controls on Anthropic’s newest and most powerful AI models, Fable and Mythos, after researchers at Amazon found a way to jailbreak some of Fable’s cybersecurity guardrails. The decision forced Anthropic to disable the two AI models for all users, since American “deemed export” rules mean that allowing any foreign national, including those who work for Anthropic, to access the models would violate the law. Anthropic has been scrambling to try to get the export controls rescinded, sending a delegation of high level executives to Washington earlier this week to try to hash out a compromise with the government. But so far, no deal has been reached.The government decision has wide ranging implications and sparked all kinds of reactions. Those who think Anthropic uses “fear-based marketing”—hyping the dangerous potential of its models as a kind of psychologically-crafty way of touting its models as the most capable on the market—reacted with schadenfreude, declaring that Anthropic was only reaping what it sowed. (AI “godfather” Yann LeCun, who has been dismissive of AI’s existential risks, was among those endorsing this view.) Others, who think Anthropic is sincere in its communication about its models’ dangers, were more divided on the decision. Some were willing to give the government some benefit of the doubt and think Anthropic may have been reckless in releasing Fable, which was supposed to offer many of the benefits of Mytho