The Anthropic Fable Farce - by Ben Goertzel - Eurykosmotron
Eurykosmotron
SubscribeSign in
The Anthropic Fable Farce<br>The Very Predictable Problems with Crippling or Export-Controlling Frontier Intelligence
Ben Goertzel<br>Jun 13, 2026
28
Share
Anthropic shipped its most powerful model on a Wednesday and was ordered to pull it by Friday. That forty-eight-hour farce is probably about as close to a controlled demonstration as we’re going to get of why advanced AI can’t be effectively locked down in the actual modern world — and why open and decentralized is the only kind of safety that survives contact with the real world.<br>What happened this week with Anthropic, the US government, and the Fable model is about as close to a controlled experiment as real life ever hands you. For the last week I’ve been writing and talking about the relative safety of open versus closed, decentralized versus centralized AI — and the gist of my argument has been that even if you want to lock down a closed, centralized model, that is simply not how things work given the technology and the geopolitics we actually have. And then the world went and illustrated the point for me quite beautifully, over a period of roughly forty-eight hours.<br>On Wednesday, Anthropic released Fable 5 — the first widely available model in its Mythos family, its most powerful line. By Friday evening the US government had issued an export-control directive barring any foreign national from accessing it — not just foreigners abroad, but any foreign national anywhere, including Anthropic’s own non-citizen employees. Faced with that, Anthropic had no real choice but to pull the model offline for everyone.<br>As an aside, I have a small personal stake in this particular policy mayhem…. I was born in Brazil, though I grew up almost entirely in the United States; I’m a dual citizen, which is to say I am a foreign national and also a US national. Am I allowed to use Fable? I have no idea — and it doesn’t matter, because nobody can. I log into Claude and it’s simply gone; I switch the little selector back to Opus and carry on. If this policy sticks, the logical endpoint is KYC for frontier AI: upload your passport to use the latest model, the way you open an overseas bank account online.<br>A model too dangerous to release — until it wasn’t
I’ll try to summarize the backstory concisely, as most readers probably know it. Not long ago Anthropic put out Mythos, a model especially good at hacking — finding and chaining software vulnerabilities. This is part of an ongoing churn in the security world, where models keep getting better at breaking into systems and, in parallel, better at hardening them: a security arms race that is both inevitable and genuinely worrying, and one I suspect gets tamed in the medium term mainly by correct-by-construction software rather than by any one model staying ahead. Mythos is very good at hacking. So are other models. The next generation will be even better.<br>From the start I suspected the breathless framing — this model is too dangerous to release — was a blend of sincere concern and shrewd positioning. There’s an obvious marketing logic to telling people a thing is too dangerous for them to have, and then, a couple of months later, handing it over: now they feel they’re holding the most dangerous object in the world!!! Exciting !! …<br>Go back to the prehistory of the LLM space and OpenAI did exactly this with GPT-2 in 2019, agonizing in public over whether the model was too dangerous to release and then releasing it to a chorus of “this must be incredibly powerful.” That model was in fact a real step forward. So is Mythos. Neither is the runaway supermind that turns into Skynet. What exact mix of sincerity and theater is in play in these companies I can’t say — I know people at the labs, but not the ones setting this policy — but the pattern is familiar.<br>Fable is essentially Mythos with part of its range disabled: ask it something sensitive — cyber, bio, and the like — and it quietly falls back to a weaker model. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And we never really know what blend of models sits behind any of these branded services anyway; anyone who codes with them has watched a model get suddenly smarter, then dumber, then smarter again, month to month. Playing games on the back end is not new, and it fits the marketing narrative neatly: this is the most dangerous thing in the world — do try it.<br>The backstory: Anthropic versus the Pentagon
Another more interesting thread has been running between Anthropic and the US government. A few months ago the two were locked in a standoff: the Pentagon wanted to use Claude “for all lawful purposes”, with no restrictions, and Anthropic held two red lines it would not drop — that its models not be used for mass surveillance of Americans, and not be wired into fully autonomous weapons that select and engage targets without human oversight. Anthropic refused to remove them. The...