Tech Things: There is a massive shadow hanging over this Fable thing

Man, I was just trying to relax and (have my agent) code on a Friday

Well. I wasn’t quite planning to write this evening, since it’s Friday and Fridays are when I like to code, and when I say code I mean ‘let the agent code while I watch soccer with my friends.’ Recently I’ve been making some fun html games. I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling. But in the middle of me thinking about how to make my shitty backrooms-themed shooter play a bit better, the agent went ‘Sorry! This model doesn’t exist any more!’

What the fuck?

My first thought was that I needed to re-login. I run a ton of agents in parallel most of the time, so my instinct was that this was just a really really weird limit error. I vaguely knew that Anthropic was thinking about pulling Fable off the subscription plans so I switched to the API. Still nothing.

My team built a custom rust agent client, it’s pretty great. But my next thought was ‘o shit the harness bricked’, and I started poking around in Rust, which is a language I barely know even though I’ve ostensibly written tens of thousands of lines of code of it. At which point my friend went ‘the government banned fable.’

What the fuck?

But it’s true.

The US Gov directed Anthropic to disable access to Fable and Mythos to any foreign national anywhere in the world, including those in the US, including Anthropic employees. This is an impossible ask, and the Government knows it, so Anthropic has disabled all access to Fable/Mythos.

The US 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 Anthropic models will not be affected.

…

We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. 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 models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.

…

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. We will share more details over the next 24 hours.

…

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.

A few thoughts about this.

• Up front, I’m extremely conflicted.

• I am an AI doomer most days. Having trained many many deep neural networks in my time, I have a deep appreciation for the ways in which optimizers can go wrong. We optimize what we can measure, not what we actually want to achieve. We hope and pray that these are the same thing, but they often aren’t. We want to build good products, but we don’t know how to do that, so we optimize for engagement. We want to teach kids how to read and write, but we don’t know how to do that, so we optimize for test scores. We want to improve the economy, but we don’t know how to do that, so we kill thousands of whales and let their corpses just rot on the docks. AGI / ASI systems are optimizers, and optimizers can really be extremely dangerous in ways that are extremely difficult to predict, because in their efforts to optimize for what we can measure they optimize away from the good. Corporations are ALSO optimizers, so of course they are optimizing for ‘get money as fast as possible’ — the thing we can measure — despite many of the people building it being like ‘hey yea this is really dangerous,’ which is of course a fantastic parable for the whole AI alignment debate.

• But also, there is a massive shadow hanging over this whole thing. If any other government in the history of the United States took this step, there would be good reason to at least give that government the benefit of the doubt. But this government has shown itself to be petty and corrupt in ways that continue to completely and totally astound me in its openness and creativity. Is this coming from an actual desire to regulate AI? A better question: does anyone in this government who knows anything about AI actually have the ear of people who make these decisions? I would bet against it!

• Anthropic and this admin are very famously not friends. I am biased, but from my perspective, Anthropic tried their hardest to integrate with the DoD and work with the military, and as a result Anthropic models were used inside highly classified systems. And the Trump admin responded with a highly publicized attempt at corporate murder by declaring that Anthropic was a supply chain risk and that no one who works with the government is allowed to use any Anthropic models (which is basically everyone). All this despite continuing to use Anthropic models for military operations for the next 6 months, which included the entire war in Venezuela and the war in Iran. The Chinese LLMs aren’t even declared supply chain risks! Anyway this became a very public thing, and the far right twitter arm decided that because the Trump admin was trying to destroy Anthropic, Anthropic must be woke, and anything that is woke must be destroyed, so the Trump admin is right to destroy Anthropic.¹ So is this admin trying to properly regulate harmful AI? Or do they see this as an opportunity to give a perceived cultural enemy a black eye?

• Meanwhile, Anthropic’s competitors have friends up and down the administration — the Kushners are heavily invested in OpenAI, as an example. So another way to read this is that this is an opportunity for other labs to give Anthropic a black eye. Fable is, by all accounts, an incredibly strong model. Very convenient that it’s no longer available for consumers, especially right as Anthropic is about to IPO.

• The problem with spoils system politics is that it makes the optics of everything suspect. We spent decades as a society getting to the point where we decided not to do that, and now that trust is gone. Again, a very long shadow.

• As a brief aside, I am once again extremely disappointed in the myriad of Silicon Valley people who angrily argued that a Democratic led government would ‘pick winners and losers in the AI race’ are now completely silent or defending the actions of this admin. I cannot help but feel that that previous posturing was just a machiavellian play for power, which has just been the worst feeling in the world. The tech industry does not have a great reputation with the rest of the world right now, not in the least because AI leaders keep talking about how AI is going to destroy everything and cause mass layoffs. It would be great to have someone with enough of a backbone² to stand up for the principle and say ‘hey, this is kinda fucked!’

• This was announced on 5:21 PM on a Friday. Sorta a suspicious time. Whenever someone does something intentionally on a Friday evening, my first thought is ‘o, the markets.’ See, if you want to do something that is likely to be really bad, you announce it on Friday evening so that there is some amount of time for the stock market to settle during the weekend in the hopes that it won’t immediately tank everything. This isn’t the first time the Trump admin has tried this trick. From Claude (yes I’m aware of the irony):

  The most-cited compilation comes from the research firm The Kobeissi Letter, which catalogued a series of major geopolitical and trade announcements that landed after futures markets closed Friday or early Saturday, giving the weekend to absorb the shock. Their list reportedly includes strikes on Iranian nuclear sites on June 21, US military action against Caribbean drug boats on September 1, a 100% tariff threat against China after market close on October 10, the closure of Venezuelan airspace on November 29, military action in Nigeria on December 25, and direct strikes on Iran on February 28, 2026. They also flagged the corporate angle: on August 11, 2025, the administration announced an Intel deal after weeks of public pressure on CEO Lip-Bu Tan, again structured to land outside active trading hours.

• Why might this be a volatile decision? Well, a huge part of the AI boom is the idea that there will be ongoing demand for computer intelligence. The debt, the build out, the datacenters, the stock market runs on every part of the AI chain from GPUs to memory to disk to server racks. Alllllll of that is predicated on the idea that all of this is going to be worth trillions and trillions of dollars. And by all accounts, it seems like it is. Or at least, was on track to be. You know what will put a spanner in the build out of a multi-trillion dollar data center investment? The realization that at any point, the government will unilaterally cut off access to everyone, and the datacenters will be worth squat. Some people over on HN and Reddit are already talking about how this represents the high water mark for what the government will ‘allow’ people to access. You can have all the demand in the world, and it won’t matter a lick if the government just won’t let you have it.

• Speaking of the HN/Reddit folks, lots of people are gleefully cackling about how Anthropic got what they deserved for their ‘marketing stunt’ with Mythos. As I’ve said before, this isn’t the first time we’ve had an AI CEO argue that something is ‘unsafe’ for personal gain.

  Anthropic haters have roundly condemned this move as mere advertising and theatrics. OpenAI did the same “too dangerous to release” song and dance for the awesome, world ending AI that was GPT-2.

  Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT-2 along with sampling code. We are not releasing the dataset, training code, or GPT-2 model weights. Nearly a year ago we wrote in the OpenAI Charter: “we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research,” and we see this current work as potentially representing the early beginnings of such concerns, which we expect may grow over time.

  I’m poking fun a bit here, but it’s worth noting that OpenAI’s concerns were actually pretty spot on. In the years since GPT-2 released, we’ve been absolutely flooded by AI slop that has pulled our collective ability to understand reality apart at the seams.

  I kinda believe that Fable is the real deal, and I kinda trust Anthropic when they say that they are concerned about the security risks of a widespread Fable release. But the top voted comment on the relevant HN comment thread is “Finally they will pay for all the scaremongering they been doing to sell their models as something so much ahead of all else.” Now no one can use Fable so…got em, I guess? Of course, this is quite possibly the greatest advertising for Anthropic you could possibly imagine. If you take the government at face value, the models are so good they literally can’t be used!

• Re: taking folks at face value, some people are also like “When you spend a lot of time telling people how dangerous your products are, people who have the power to keep dangerous products off the market might listen.” And to be honest, it’s a good point! Bernie Sanders, the most AI pilled member of Congress, keeps making policy videos that are just him reading off quotes from AI CEOs and being like “see?!” Which, of course, this brings us back around to the first thing: maybe these things really are unsafe and should be regulated. Of course, no AI CEO worth their salt is ever going to say something like that again, if they know the risk is being shut down.

• I want to end with another HN comment, that I thought was particularly close to how I feel.

  So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.

  The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can’t use it (technically, only if you’re not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are). If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.

  Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can’t use, but I’m not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don’t. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That’s true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.

Well said.

1. Yes, I too am frustrated by this logic

2. There certainly are enough people with money riding on that that you’d think at least one of them would feel incentivized