American Government Takes Down Claude Fable

No good policy gets announced shortly after 5pm eastern on a Friday. Here we go again. The Once And Future Fable The United States Department of Commerce, as per a letter from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, apparently in response to a narrow jailbreak identified by Amazon, has classified Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as being subject to US export controls. That explicitly means cutting off access to all ‘foreign nationals,’ even within the United States, even if they are Anthropic employees. Given Anthropic has no means to verify citizenship at this time, that meant complete shutdown of the model, at least for the time being. Anthropic: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected. Dean W. Ball: I can’t tell if this is lawfare against Anthropic in particular or extreme national-security hawkery. Regardless, it is simply cartoonish. The justification for this appears to be rather flimsy, at best, and based on lack of understanding of what even is a jailbreak or how defense in depth works. Anthropic: We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass. Anthropic’s post