The week that changed AI: Inside Trump’s Anthropic crackdown, and how a phone call from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy triggered the chaos

The moment that triggered the Trump administration’s dramatic crackdown on Anthropic, and may completely reset the ground rules for U.S. regulation of AI, happened almost by accident. And it was sparked by one of Anthropic’s top investors: Amazon. Last week, researchers at Amazon were busy stress-testing Anthropic’s newly released Fable 5, a “safe” version of Anthropic’s Mythos AI model. Anthropic had repeatedly said that its Mythos-class models had superhuman software hacking skills that were too dangerous to be released to the general public. Fable 5, which Anthropic launched on June 9, was equipped with what it said were robust safeguards against cybersecurity risks. The Amazon researchers testing Fable, however, discovered a “jailbreak” that they documented as allowing users to bypass safety rails and access information that could be used in a cyberattack. Amazon promptly notified Anthropic. But the situation suddenly escalated when Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy happened to be on a pre-scheduled call with White House officials last Thursday, June 11, regarding an unrelated topic, according to two sources familiar with Amazon. Jassy brought up the vulnerability his team had found, and White House officials encouraged him to flag the issue directly to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the sources said. Jassy spoke to Bessent that same day. He told the treasury secretary about the Fable jailbreak but also stressed that he was concerned about the cyber capabilities of all of the frontier AI models, including those from other labs. Bessent has been leading the administration’s response to Anthropic’s Mythos model, largely because of the threat Mythos-powered cyberattacks could pose to the global financial system. His phone call with Jassy set in motion a chain of events that quickly became international news. By Friday evening, just four days after Fable’s launch, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick had hit Anthropic with unprecedented export controls