The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
Fable 5 Shut Down by US Government
13 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What does the US government order regarding Anthropic's Fable 5 mean?
In this emergency episode, we are discussing the US government shutting down Anthropix Fable 5. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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Chapter 2: How did Anthropic respond to the government's directive?
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. For the first time in the three-year history of this show, news has broken on a Friday afternoon that is too significant to wait until Monday to explore. Last night, just before 9 Eastern Time in the U.S., Anthropic tweeted, the U.S.
government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national. whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other cloud models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Chapter 3: What are the implications of the US government's actions on AI models?
After this absolutely stunning news, journalists and internet sleuths flew into a tizzy to try to figure out what the heck had actually just happened. The Wall Street Journal added some color, reporting that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had sent a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei announcing that the new models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were now subject to export restrictions.
meaning usage by customers outside the U.S. as well as foreign nationals within the U.S. would be prohibited. So where did this seemingly capricious policy come from? It was apparently a report from another company about a jailbreak it had discovered. Anthropic gave more details in their blog post, writing, We received the directive from the government today at 5.21 p.m.
The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes that it has become aware of a method of bypassing or jailbreaking Fable 5.
Chapter 4: What concerns have been raised by experts about the government's decision?
We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly available methods are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass. And basically from there went on to say that they just don't buy the US's logic.
They point out that in the weeks leading up to the release of Fable, they worked with the US government and many others to red team Fable safeguards for a significant amount of time. They pointed out that, quote, no testers have yet been able to find a universal jailbreak, a jailbreak method that can very broadly bypass the model safeguards.
Indeed, they write, we suspect that perfect jailbreak resistance is not currently possible for any model provider. Every safeguard used in the industry is vulnerable to non-universal jailbreaks, which can elicit some cyber information in specific circumstances, and it is likely that universal jailbreaks will eventually be found in the future.
They said, Given that perfect jailbreak resistance does not appear to be possible today, Anthropic adopted a defense-in-depth strategy with Fable 5. We aimed to make jailbreaks either narrow or very expensive to produce, and to combine this with thorough monitoring to quickly detect and shut down any successful attacks.
Harkening back to the controversy of this week, they continue, this is also why Anthropic has required 30-day retention of customer data with Fable, a policy change that carries real costs for us with customers, but that allows us to research and mitigate jailbreaks.
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Chapter 5: How might this situation affect the future of AI regulation?
Importantly, they conclude, we have not even received a disclosure of a concerning non-universal potential jailbreak that led to a harmful result. The potential jailbreaks that have been disclosed to us are either entirely benign responses or are minor findings that provide no mythospecific uplift.
To date, they write, 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's GPT-5.5, and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.
Given that, then they write, we are complying with the government's legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people.
If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers. Now, the Wall Street Journal later added, the jailbreak research in question was done by researchers at Amazon, who used a series of prompts to get anthropics models to provide them with information about a handful of security vulnerabilities.
Now, one note, as people will clarify, is that although the Wall Street Journal reported that the research was done by Amazon, the journal did not report that it was Amazon who shared the findings with the US government.
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Chapter 6: What potential consequences does this have for Anthropic's business?
Nick on X writes, Project Glasswing's whole purpose is to literally do security tests to find vulnerabilities and share findings. Amazon is a Glasswing partner and anthropic investor. So why would they file a federal complaint? Now, Prins on X put together a bunch of different posts to try to put together something of a timeline of what happened.
They argued that, contrary to Anthropic's argument that every safeguard used in the industry is vulnerable to non-universal jailbreaks, and they stated that clearly when they released Fable 5, quote, my best guess is that the U.S. government did not fully realize this at the time when the release of Fable 5 was approved.
Now, Prince added that, per Axios, the government contacted Anthropic to ask to pause releasing the models but was unsuccessful. Or, as they put it, Anthropic told the government to pound sand. Now, it's hard to wrap our heads around just how consequential this is.
Rishi Sharma was one of many to point out that a huge number of Anthropix technical staff, including no less than Andrej Karpathy, are not U.S.
Chapter 7: How are international stakeholders reacting to the US's actions?
citizens, but instead here on things like EB-1 visas, meaning that even internally they are not allowed to interact with these models now. So where we sit, at least at 7.32 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday morning, is that fable and mythos are not available to anyone right now.
And you got to think that there is a flurry of behind-the-scenes activity trying to resolve this as fast as humanly possible. So what does the chattering class think? Dan Robustus on X teed up pretty much the entire conversation when he wrote, Am I mad at Anthropic or the U.S. government? Both? Probably both. Yeah, it's both.
Chapter 8: What does this mean for the future of AI development globally?
So let's talk first about the US government side, or specifically the what the hell are you doing US government side. Many pointed out that the specific pretext for this banning is incredibly loose. AI entrepreneur Bindu Reddy wrote, this is really stupid. The US banned Fable just because it responded with information that is already freely available on the internet.
Every other model can easily be made to respond to some silly questions about common security vulnerabilities or how to make drugs or whatever. The cluelessness of the government is astounding. In the Wall Street Journal, the CEO of cybersecurity firm Letta Security, Katie Mazuris, wrote, Who at the White House evaluated this and thought it was a threat?
It's a complete overreaction because this is exactly the kind of prompting that defenders would do. AI policy expert Dean Ball wrote, Regardless, it's simply cartoonish.
Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Chris McGuire wrote, if the Trump administration is so concerned about access to advanced AI models, why is it not enforcing the export controls currently on the books on advanced AI models or the export controls that would require a license to buy large numbers of AI chips to make these models?
Now, to be clear about Chris's position, he later tweeted, I actually think targeted export controls on model access are prudent, but across-the-board controls on all countries on a single model without any warning is highly questionable. Export controls are a critical tool and an extremely powerful one. Used correctly, they have the potential to massively extend the US lead in AI.
Used incorrectly, they will stifle AI development. The Department of Commerce's export control strategy has been completely incoherent and sabotaging. It is sending powerful AI chips to China, not enforcing controls that would prevent Chinese smuggling, creating massive loopholes that allow AI chips to be sent to China, and preventing US AI companies from releasing their own models.
This has to stop. We urgently need a smart export control strategy that applies robust export controls to deny our adversaries access to advanced technology while advantaging US companies. Commerce and BIS are consistently doing the opposite.
If BIS doesn't understand how to use its authorities or what the implications are of its actions, then it needs to find some new personnel who can actually execute a competent export control strategy. The current one is incoherent and self-defeating. Many pointed out that it was also hypocritical.
Emerson Brooking from the Atlantic Council reshared a post from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from just a couple of weeks ago when they bit back at the New York Times after the NYT reported that President Trump had signed an executive order asking tech companies to give the government oversight of new AI models before releasing them to the public.
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