The Geomblog: The "fable" of Anthropic and the USG

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Saturday, June 13, 2026

The "fable" of Anthropic and the USG

News moves fast. 12 hours ago I was enjoying the demolition that the US put on Paraguay when I heard that Anthropic had shut down access to Fable and Mythos (their latest and most powerful models).<br>Since then, more news has surfaced about what went down, and I feel like it's a good exercise in understanding both the policy and psychodrama around AI today - with maybe even a moral or two like Aesop's .... FABLES (yes I'm going to keep making bad jokes and no you can't stop me)<br>Part 1: The event<br>Let's first lay out the facts of the matter. To the best of my knowledge, here's what transpired.

Some researchers (apparently at Amazon) uncovered ways to jailbreak Fable to (possibly) perform cybersecurity-related attacks.<br>Someone (apparently Andy Jassy) told the White House (or the Treasury Secretary) about this.<br>The WH and Anthropic had a back and forth on what needed to be done about this: Anthropic claimed these were not serious jalbreaks, and the WH said that they were and that Anthropic needed to either take down the model or something...<br>The WH then invoked export controls to demand that Anthropic block access to Fable/Mythos for foreign nationals (regardless of where they happen to be)<br>Anthropic blocked access entirely, arguing that they had no way of distinguishing foreign nationals from American citizens.<br>Now most of the reporting will focus on solidifying the facts of the matter (I hope) and will probably also focus on the drama. Drama is fun (don't get me wrong), but it can make thinking about policy really hard.

So let me lay out some of the questions about the drama that might be useful to have answered, but then try to focus on the bigger policy questions that come out of this.<br>What were these mysterious jailbreaks? This is actually an important question that will shape the policy response as well.<br>How were these jailbreaks flagged and sent up the chain, and why was the communication of the form "hey I called my buddy at the WH and told him stuff"?<br>What actually transpired in the discussion between the WH and Anthropic?<br>Part II: Clean-slate Policy<br>Let's pretend we are working in a vacuum for a second, and think about this with policy hats on, without worrying about the actual players (unrealistic I know, but a useful exercise).

The US Government is worried about powerful models allowing any user to generate (say) cybersecurity hacks that can compromise critical national infrastructure (for e.g the financial sector which is why the Treasury Secretary is paying close attention). These models are general purpose and have many uses, and the USG doesn't just want to shut them down entirely (we can debate that, but not right now).

What they'd like to do is have some way to monitor models for specific kinds of risks, before deployment, and also on a continuing basis. Maybe there's some kind of voluntary program where providers of powerful models give access to independent testers (for eg. some kind of Center for AI Security Standards and Innovation) who can identify risks, communicate these risks to the companies involved, and make sure that mitigations are put in place. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be an ongoing process.

If this sounds familiar, it should. because a) it's how we do cybersecurity right now without any government involvement and b) it's a little bit of how the recent WH EO was constructed (there were other parts of the EO that are problematic, but again, not for now)

In other words, there's a way to do what the government wants if this is indeed what they want and companies are willing to cooperate (this is setting aside whether you and I want the government to do this. That's a different discussion)

Part III: (we know) Drama<br>Well. that's all well and good. But I don't unfortunately live in a rationalist universe where I can write 20,000 word screeds on moreright.com and be "aligned" with everyone else. What's the reality here?

The first thing I want to emphasize is that drama loves a good guy (yes "guy") and a bad guy, and it's really tempting to first decide who's the bad guy and then decide the other one must be good. It would be really tempting to say for e.g "the Trump administration has no clue on AI and therefore Anthropic is the good guy", or "Tech companies are evillll and the administration is therefore doing the right thing".

Unfortunately (reporters please please pretty please pay attention), it's not that simple.

There are no innocent actors here.

This particular administration has always approached AI regulation in a very "we will say we are hands off but actually we are not but it's really about who's in favor and who's not that decides how we will act" way. Trying to retrofit logical policy actions onto that is hard, and this case is no different. The administration...