The Once And Future Fable #2 - by Zvi Mowshowitz

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The Once And Future Fable #2

Zvi Mowshowitz<br>Jun 15, 2026

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On Friday evening the United States Government has forced Anthropic to take down all access to Fable and Mythos.<br>It’s been a rough weekend.<br>Dean W. Ball: One thing about AI regulation being haphazardly imposed on just-released, highly performant models is that in a very real sense, the government just made my world *dumber.* In some impressionistic sense I almost always think this is true of government, but here it is literal.

More details have come to light. There remains some fog of war, but we now have a rather good idea why Claude Fable and Mythos were, deeply stupidly, taken down.<br>A narrow jailbreak was discovered, of the type Anthropic warned in advance obviously existed. All demonstrated outputs are things GPT-5.5 can not only produce, but produce without any sort of jailbreak or bypass.

The White House demanded Anthropic take down Fable to ‘fix’ the situation, and did not listen when Dario tried to explain that there was no situation to fix.

When Anthropic did not do so, the White House hit them with an export restriction that they knew would force Fable and Mythos down for everyone.

A lot of nihilists are justifying this decision, and blaming Anthropic, all of whom are very much confirming that they adhere to Dean Ball’s portrait of the United States Government as a dying NPC hospice patient we have to properly placate with the proper vibes and genuflection so they don’t lash out at us. Except they equate this with strength and righteousness, because might makes right, power and vibes.<br>This is a fast developing story with a large speed premium, so I apologize for any errors, and for the structure likely not being ideal. We do the best we can.<br>What we do not know is:<br>What was motivating the government to make these decisions.

How deeply they were confused about how any of this works.

Whether they demanded and are demanding a narrow fix or a global fix.<br>Narrow fix is probably easy. Global fix is probably impossible.

What they intend to do next and what they are trying to accomplish.

The good outcome would be that this is a terrible misunderstanding, a reflection of a panic reaction, which can be sorted out quickly, after which we can restore access. Or where they otherwise face enough pressure they quickly realize they made a mistake, or Anthropic can do something to quickly assuage their concerns even if it is dumb. There will still be a terrible precedent set, which comes with a lot of permanent damage to trust in American AI, to our business climate, to our ability to employ vital foreign AI talent, to America’s relationships to its allies, to the progress of Project Glasswing and our cyber security, and to the rule of law.<br>The silver lining, which might be large, is that this will have shown that when we actually need to act, we are not afraid to act, even at great economic and political cost. Sometimes there will be a demand driven by national security, or other concerns, and if you cannot physically meet that demand without shutting down? Tough. This was (with notably extremely rare exceptions) an action far out of bounds of what safety advocates have dared propose as even an option, and it happened. So there’s no more saying, in such situations: ‘Give up, the government will never do [X].’<br>This also emphasizes the need to figure out how to act well, now, before we need to act. If we get into such a situation, and don’t have a good way to do [X], we might well do [X] in a no good, haphazard, deeply destructive way, instead. So get to work figuring out how to strike deals, or do a pause, or take down a given model, and so on.<br>The bad outcome is if this is not a terrible misunderstanding, is motivated by other factors, and cannot be sorted out quickly. The government might actually be rapidly escalating towards a forcible takeover of America’s leading AI labs by a would-be authoritarian unitary executive that thinks you should never talk back to it, and when it says jump (or asks for stock, or anything else) everyone should ask how high. Or else.<br>There is also the third possibility that, as unlikely as it looks now, the White House was correct, the threat was real, and this was an emergency situation, whether or not they did a good job justifying this to Dario and Anthropic in real time, and whether or not they are doing a good job justifying this now. Perhaps this was itself dangerous, or perhaps it implied too high risk of other dangers.<br>We cannot rule this out until we can verify technical claims. And we should not assume that next time, the company will be right and the government wrong. There likely will come a time when a company says ‘This Is Fine’ and is very, very wrong.<br>If that proves to be true, Anthropic will have lost a ton of credibility on all fronts, which is another reason I find this so unlikely. They...