AI #173: AI Pauses

A lot of things are always happening. Only one story matters. Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 were shut down, by the White House, via an imposition of export controls at 5:23pm on Friday, wreaking all sorts of havoc. There was then a scramble. Anthropic flew its people out to Washington, where they met with the Trump Administration on Monday, with hopes expressed that this could be quickly resolved. What caused this? The Trump Administration said it was due to a jailbreak of Fable, which we now know they were told about by Amazon. They called Dario Amodei, who they complain did not take the issue sufficiently seriously. Rather than shutting down the model, he tried to explain why he saw no need to do that. This did not go well. The ‘jailbreak’ turns out to be saying ‘fix this code,’ and the demo was getting Fable to find the same weaknesses that were easily identified by Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. As in, Fable is willing to work to fix security vulnerabilities if you give it a codebase. From this information and process, you could then figure out what the original bug in the code was, and exploit it, despite Fable refusing to to do that if you typed in ‘hack this server.’ The Trump administration now says that Fable can come back online when Anthropic ‘fixes’ this ‘jailbreak.’ That is of course impossible. This cannot be fixed. Your AI is either highly skilled at and capable of writing secure code, or it is not. You cannot draw this level of distinction between offensive and defensive capability. The only ways to have this not allow you to route around the classifiers are either to have the classifiers not try to block similar requests in the first place, or to broadly take away Fable’s ability to code. This is now day seven of this pause in the deployment of frontier AI capabilities. We continue to be a little under even money for it to end by July 1. Check the bold links above for my full coverage of that. This post is mostly about everything else that is happening.