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Chapter 1: What led to the shutdown of Anthropic's AI models?
Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry.
I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor.
Today on the show, we're bringing you a special, shorter episode to explain the latest escalation between Anthropic and the Trump administration.
Over the past weekend, the Trump administration unexpectedly imposed export controls on Anthropic's latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, basically ordering the company to bar access to, quote, any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States. In response, Anthropic disabled access to these models for all users to make sure they could comply with the directive.
Now, Anthropic executives are reportedly in Washington, D.C. to speak with the Trump administration officials and figure out how they can resolve this impasse.
So this is remarkable. It's also it's our first emergency podcast.
So very exciting.
This news unfolded on Friday, pretty late. What was your reaction when it came down? It came past your way.
I mean, it was unprecedented.
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of the Trump administration's export controls?
I don't think we've seen export controls applied in this way. Obviously, this is just the latest escalation in an ongoing fight between Anthropic and this administration. But it also seems like it comes on the heels of Anthropic really drumming up a lot of hype around how powerful and scary its models are. And so there was a little bit of irony of like, wow, you tell everyone that your models are
Really, they can do incredibly capable things. They're too powerful for their own good. And eventually people will believe you.
This part of the story goes back to April or so. So Anthropic has this model called Mythos. And they say, look, it's so good at cybersecurity things specifically like finding bugs in code and creating exploits for it. That we cannot release it to the general public. We are going to give it to a few trusted partners so that they have time to defend themselves before we release it to the public.
Very scary stuff. And look, people have said different. There are varying views on how essential that was.
Chapter 3: How did Anthropic respond to the export control directive?
Is that fair to say?
Yeah. So I think actually we need to back up even further because the mythos release, I know, it came after Anthropic had gone head to head with the Department of Defense, basically saying that it wanted guardrails on how the military could use its models. The Department of Defense did not want those guardrails in place. And so there was a standoff.
And by the time they released mythos, it kind of looked like Well, whether this was the intention or not, it was getting Anthropic back in the administration's good graces.
And we talked to sources on a variety of different levels who said that while relations between the Pentagon and Anthropic were still pretty icy, relationships between Anthropic and the intelligence community were actually starting to thaw. So it looked like these talks had been successful and at least the White House was in communication with Anthropic as a result of the mythos release.
So then we get to the point where Anthropic says, okay, people have had time to steady, ready their defenses in light of this powerful model we're going to release. They go ahead and say, all right, we're releasing this on June 9 as Claude Fable 5. They say, hey, we're putting this in public, but... We are making it so that you cannot use it for cybersecurity.
You cannot use it for biological weapons. I think there were a few restrictions they put on it. And they said, look, we tested this up and down.
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Chapter 4: What role did cybersecurity experts play in this situation?
We red teamed it, which is the phrase for you treat it as though you were an attacker. And you can't jailbreak this thing. It's solid. It's not going to do the bad things. Go forth.
Exactly. So basically, they were releasing a mythos class model, but with a bunch of safeguards in place. And what that meant is that if you asked the model questions about how to create a bioweapon or what have you, the model would basically refuse to answer. Yep.
But then after the release, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy calls the administration and basically flags a jailbreak that would essentially allow someone to bypass the model's guardrails and potentially get it to do bad things. Jassy wasn't the only person to make this call, but he's the only one we know about right now.
Yeah, and obviously we don't know exactly how that unfolded, but it's interesting that it came from a competitor.
a competitor who is invested in Anthropic. So it's a complicated web. What happens next is pretty widely disputed between the White House and administration officials and Anthropic. But basically, the White House says that they call Anthropic and try and get CEO Dario Amadei on the phone, but they were unable to reach him because he was supposedly at a wellness retreat.
Anthropic vehemently denies that this was
Either way, he'll need one after this.
Yeah, for sure. For sure. Regardless, they get on the phone, looks like, you know, an hour and 15 minutes after the request was made to have that call. And Dario basically tries to get more information about the jailbreak, like what was going on? How serious was it? Why is the White House flipping out?
It looks like Anthropic didn't believe this was as big a deal as the White House believed it was. And there was some disagreement about the severity of what they had found. In any case, the administration asks Anthropic to voluntarily remove the models. And Dario, importantly, doesn't commit to doing that. It doesn't look like he said no, but they get off the call and there's not the commitment.
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Chapter 5: How did the release of Mythos impact Anthropic's relationship with the government?
And then I think there's this question about, well, was the jailbreak, was it really, really serious? Or was it something that was a little more tailored and narrow and the administration didn't have like the technical expertise to like understand? I think, you know, the administration is saying, look, Amazon brought this to us.
We ran it by cybersecurity experts up and down the administration and they said it was really serious. We believe we have, I think the word was proof, but Anthropic is still... seemingly disputing that.
Well, because what Anthropic is saying is like, look, the stuff that you can, the capabilities you can unlock with this jailbreak are already available on other models that have been out there for a while. Like you're not introducing any unique risk with this specific jailbreak that you don't already have in some of these other models. And that sort of ties into the
some of the most vocal defenders of Anthropic were cybersecurity professionals. There was a big open letter from cybersecurity folks and tech CEOs saying, look, you know, however worried you are about this, we're more worried because while this, while Mithos class models are good at offensive hacking, they're also really good at defense.
We need that help with defense because there are other models out there that are going to help people attack us. It's an interesting trade-off that I don't know that the administration has really fully weighed.
No. And I think that some of the pushback we are seeing is like, how are we supposed to compete with China when China is releasing really advanced open source models? Anyone can use them. And in the U.S., we can no longer use, generally speaking, like the most capable models we have access to. And I don't think the administration has a really strong answer to that, at least not yet.
This is also coming at a time when AI policy within the White House is being
pretty hotly contested even within the White House like David Sachs who was the AI and crypto czar is no longer in his kind of official position Susie Wiles and Michael Kratios are kind of like running part of that show but I think there's a lot of disagreement even within the administration about the right way forward our expert controls the right move if not how do we control these things
How much should the administration be weighing in on models before they are released? Because this is happening shortly after Trump released an executive order saying that they wanted AI companies to voluntarily give them kind of a preview about the most capable models before a general release.
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