TL; DR
Amazon’s Jassy told the government that researchers used Fable 5 for cyberattack information. This triggered the command to close Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is said to be the source of the security concern which forced the US government on Friday to shut down Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to every customer Anthropic. The Wall Street Journal reported that Jassy told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other officials that Amazon researchers were using the Fable 5 to obtain data that could be used in cyberattacks. The government has since imposed an export control ban on both models.
The reveal adds an unsettling dimension to the story. Amazon is one of Anthropic’s biggest investors, putting in billions and getting a $100 billion cloud spending commitment in return. The company that funded Anthropic’s infrastructure is also the company that told the government that their models were unsafe.
An Amazon spokesperson said, “it is not unusual for governments to seek our advice on potential security risks” but declined to share details of the discussions.The spokesperson also pointed to an AWS status update confirming that Amazon’s own cloud platform was affected by the model shutdown.
David Sachs, Trump’s former AI czar and now co-chairman of the President’s Council of Science and Technology Advisers, offered a different account. He “both Anthropic and USG’s highly trusted trusted partner have emerged with jailbreak.” Bags added: “Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or post the mod. Dario refused.“
The anthropic version is different. The company said it reviewed the jailbreak technique and found it.a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities.” He called the government’s response disproportionate, saying that the worrisome features already exist in other models that are already open to the public. The shutdown affected every customer globally because Anthropic cannot filter foreign nationals from US users in real time.
Consistency is important to the AI industry. Amazon invested billions in Anthropic. Anthropic built models in AWS. Amazon’s CEO told the government that these models pose security risks. The government used export controls to force them offline. AWS was then affected by the shutdown. It’s a bizimoboro of corporate dependency and regulatory crackdown.
The immediate question for Anthropic is how quickly it can regain access. For the wider industry, precedent is important. The competitive dynamics of the AI market have gained a new weapon when a major cloud provider raised its concerns with the Treasury Secretary, leading to export control action against its portfolio company. Mythos is used by banks and government agencies for vulnerability detection. Each of those customers lost access because of a dispute between Anthropic’s biggest investor and the government, where its CEO lobbied for more regulatory power.
