Anthropic Lacks Emotional Intelligence | Lawfare

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Anthropic Lacks Emotional Intelligence<br>The stoush between Anthropic and the U.S. government has erupted once again, this time over concerns about how the release of new AI models is being managed.<br>Early last week, Anthropic rolled out two new models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5. By Friday, they'd been pulled.<br>The Wall Street Journal reported their withdrawal was kicked off by conversations on Thursday last week between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and U.S. officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Jassy raised the possibility that the models could be jailbroken, and by Friday evening the Commerce Department told Anthropic that its models would be subject to export controls. These controls prohibit the models from being used by any foreign national, regardless of whether they are inside or outside of the U.S.<br>To ensure compliance, Anthropic cut off access to the two models for all of its customers.<br>The role of jailbreaks in all of this is important to understand.<br>Mythos 5 and Fable 5 are actually the same underlying model. In essence, Anthropic slapped some stricter guardrails on Mythos 5, changed its name to Fable and made it available for general use.<br>If a user submitted a prompt to Fable related to cybersecurity, chemistry, biology, or model distillation, the guardrails would kick queries down to Opus 4.8, a less-capable model. Mythos 5 has drastically fewer safeguards but is available only to Project Glasswing participants, a select group of cyber defenders.<br>At first glance, this release strategy makes sense as a way to manage the risks of deploying advanced models. However, as Risky Business Technology Editor James Wilson points out in this podcast, the strategy relies on these guardrails actually being effective. If Fable's guardrails were susceptible to a universal jailbreak, then all Mythos 5 capabilities would be available to anyone with access to Fable 5.<br>So, to reassure everyone, when Anthropic announced Fable 5, it described the model's guardrails as "cautious … and stricter than ideal." It also said the U.K. AI Safety Institute's testing had not found a universal jailbreak in over 1,000 hours of testing, although it did concede that "it is likely impossible to completely prevent universal jailbreaks."<br>As an additional control, Anthropic instituted a 30-day retention policy for all data sent to Mythos and Fable, saying the data would help them defend against novel and complex attacks, including jailbreaks. So far, so good.<br>Where things went wrong is when Jassy raised concerns to the government, which in turn raised those concerns with Anthropic, and the company blew them off. An official also told Axios last week that the administration had tried to get Anthropic to delay releasing its new models, but Anthropic declined. But in its statement about suspending access to Fable and Mythos, Anthropic said:<br>To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI&rsquo;s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe. We will share more details over the next 24 hours.<br>This doesn't seem like a sensible comms approach to us, especially when Anthropic's name is already mud in the White House.<br>Anthropic can't seem to help itself from ignoring the Trump administration's preferences and making itself an enemy of the White House for absolutely no reason. Repeatedly.<br>The company is already on a Pentagon blacklist for being a supply chain risk. Now it's been slapped with a Commerce Department export ban because it is too dangerous for foreign use, too.<br>This latest dispute is obviously not good for the company. Lawmakers are also concerned about the White House's (non)process, as are Antropic's competitors, who worry that similar, quasi-arbitrary measures will be imposed on them. There are also concerns from cybersecurity experts that this ban will hinder defensive efforts by preventing defenders from using the latest and greatest models to improve software security.<br>In an ideal world, formal, process-driven assessments of new models and their safeguards would be used to weigh up whether the benefits of new releases outweigh risks before governments made big decisions like this. That seems like a better approach than relying on Amazon's CEO making...