On June 2, about a week before Anthropic Claude released the Fable 5 modelannounced that Glasswing added 150 new organizations to the projectA program that allows (theoretically) trusted companies, governments, and other entities to test the cybersecurity capabilities of Anthropic’s (theoretically) too-dangerous-to-release AI model, the Claude Mythos Preview.
This is a A new report from the Washington PostIt was part of a move that put Anthropic on a collision course with a dramatic export control directive from the White House, which essentially took Anthropic’s flagship consumer model, the Fable 5, offline on Friday.
However, it’s worth pausing here for a statement in an anonymously sourced Washington Post story: “Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.” It’s worth noting that Saturday’s Wall Street Journal story (again, anonymously obtained) was the trigger for the White House’s export control directive. a tip from current Amazon CEO Andy JassyAmazon said researchers have demonstrated they can jailbreak Fable and perform cybersecurity tasks it shouldn’t be allowed to perform.
In any case, the Post reports that weeks ago Anthropic showed the Trump administration a list of 111 organizations it planned to add to Project Glasswing, and then apparently announced that “about 50 additional organizations have already gained access.” One was apparently a telecommunications company in South Korea that the Trump Administration believed to have “connections to China.”
Previous reports have touched on this supposed Chinese connection, but vaguely. A story from the semaphore on Saturday, without clarifying how long ago that was. “It is unclear how the White House learned of the matter, which organization was involved in the model, and how it gained access to Mythos,” Semaphore wrote at the time. Now it is somewhat clear: Anthropic gave access to just one organization, but the White House considered it too close to China. The Post says Anthropic revoked access to the mysterious organization, but not without driving Trump administration officials crazy.
So under this new frame of events, the export control directive is now locked and loaded. And the findings of Amazon researchers were the last straw.
