The United States of Claude: Government Bans Fable 5

This is a turning point for AI. Today, we discuss Anthropic’s release and quick withdrawal of its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models after a U.S. export-control notice raised national security concerns. 

We also cover the reported jailbreak, Amazon’s role in escalating the issue, and what the episode suggests about government involvement in access to frontier AI models.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro
1:16 The Government Pulls Fable
5:26 Frontier Goes Backward
9:36 Amazon Sounds the Alarm
11:33 Types of Jailbreaks
14:55 Frontier Labs Logic
18:00 Politics and Security
27:29 History Is Happening Now

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Josh works with Anthropic as a contractor. All views expressed are his own and do not represent Anthropic, its leadership, or its affiliates. Nothing in this episode is investment advice.

Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Ejaaz:
Last Tuesday, Anthropic released the most powerful AI model the world has ever

Ejaaz:
seen. And that exact same week, by Friday at 5.21pm, they received a letter

Ejaaz:
from the government asking them to shut down access to their latest Claude Fable

Ejaaz:
and Claude Mythos models.

Ejaaz:
90 minutes later, Anthropic shut down access for everyone, citing that anyone

Ejaaz:
who isn't an American citizen or American by nature doesn't get access to this model.

Ejaaz:
Now, the official reason for this was security researchers external to Anthropic

Ejaaz:
had discovered a jailbreak, a way to

Ejaaz:
access or bypass the safeguards on Anthropic's Fable model to get access to

Ejaaz:
a restricted version, which could be used for nefarious purposes,

Ejaaz:
such as designing dangerous bioweapons or exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses in software.

Ejaaz:
Now, in the hands of the wrong people, this could be potentially dangerous,

Ejaaz:
such as China versus the US.

Ejaaz:
The craziest part about all of this is it came from an internal partner.

Ejaaz:
Amazon, who owns the largest individual stake in Anthropic as an investor were

Ejaaz:
the ones that released details of the jailbreak to the government.

Ejaaz:
They had the option of picking up the phone and calling Dario and saying,

Ejaaz:
hey, there's a jailbreak. Let's figure out how to fix this. But they decided

Ejaaz:
to contact Trump himself and report this.

Ejaaz:
And so it unpacks and unravels this entire story around governments taking a

Ejaaz:
nationalized stake in the Frontier AI labs and determining who gets access to which model.

Josh:
Last week was a roller coaster of a week. I mean, we got Fable 5 finally.

Josh:
The Mythos class model was delivered on Tuesday.

Josh:
And Friday at 5.21 p.m., after everyone is getting ready to go home,

Josh:
the U.S. government drops this notice on their desk, saying that they are initiating

Josh:
an export control directive citing national security authorities.

Josh:
The order was to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national,

Josh:
whether inside or outside of

Josh:
the United States, including Anthropik's own foreign national employees.

Josh:
This, of course, is almost impossible to enforce. How do you tell where anyone is from?

Josh:
So Anthropic says there's no clean way to wall off foreign nationals across

Josh:
global consumer products. So in order to comply, they disabled models for all

Josh:
customers, both Mythos and Fable class models.

Josh:
Following this, they also shared the initiative with AWS, which revoked Fable

Josh:
5, all their cloud services.

Josh:
And now where we sit today, everybody is using Opus 4.8 and Sonnet models because

Josh:
Fable and mythos are no longer allowed to be used this

Josh:
sucks um i was getting really used to using fable as a model it is an unbelievably

Josh:
remarkable model in terms of how powerful it is and it feels like now i woke

Josh:
up today i went to use claude and

Josh:
being faced with opus 4.8 i'm like oh man like it's a good model but i really

Josh:
miss my my crown jewel i miss

Josh:
i feel like i am less capable today than i was yesterday and that that feeling alone kind of sucks

Ejaaz:
We've crossed a very important boundary. And it's the first time we've ever

Ejaaz:
done this. This is the first instance of an AI model which has been publicly

Ejaaz:
released and then withdrawn.

Ejaaz:
And I'm feeling the withdrawal effects.

Ejaaz:
As you know, I've been using Fable 24-7 since it got released.

Ejaaz:
And when it got pulled, I was like, I think it was like out on a Friday night and I saw the news.

Ejaaz:
And that was the other thing, by the way, this happened like at the end of day,

Ejaaz:
at the end of the week, when no one was expecting this.

Josh:
Yeah, we got a lot of complaints to get into about this one.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, there's a lot of complaints that I have and that I'm sure many other people have.

Ejaaz:
But the point is, this is the first clear example of a retail accessible model

Ejaaz:
being pulled. And it was government determined. And so it brings into question,

Ejaaz:
obviously, a host of different topics and discussions, but the main one being,

Ejaaz:
is the government overreach too much? Is this a line too far?

Ejaaz:
And then it gets into an interesting discussion around who gets access to this, right?

Ejaaz:
So the clear statement that's been made by the government is,

Ejaaz:
if you aren't an American citizen or other, if you aren't American,

Ejaaz:
if you weren't born here, you don't get access to this model.

Ejaaz:
So technically on this show, Josh, that would mean that, you know,

Ejaaz:
you get access, there's a world where you get access to this model and future

Ejaaz:
models, and I don't purely because of nationality-based stuff.

Ejaaz:
So it gets into a bunch of different things that i have some pretty strong opinions

Ejaaz:
on but firstly like one earth is a is an export export control like what does that mean exactly.

Josh:
I had to look this up because i wasn't sure myself and it's basically these

Josh:
u.s rules that govern the transfer of sensitive

Josh:
technology and information to foreign persons in a foreign destination so basically

Josh:
you don't want to export the technology or the information to other countries

Josh:
because it is dangerous it can be used for a malpractice same is true with a

Josh:
lot of military information this is being treated as such.

Josh:
So for dual use technology, they call it, it has to run through the Bureau of

Josh:
Industry and Security, which is inside the Commerce Department,

Josh:
which is under the Export Administration Regulation. There's just like a lot

Josh:
of regulation involved in this.

Josh:
But basically, the United States deemed this as something that is not safe to

Josh:
be exported. And because Mythos, Class Models, and Fable are being used by foreign

Josh:
entities, regardless of the foreign entity status, they must be shut down immediately.

Josh:
And because it is nearly impossible to tell where the source of that API key

Josh:
is coming from or where the destination of that API is coming from,

Josh:
the API call, they can't actually determine with 100% certainty

Josh:
All the people that are being delivered tokens are not from foreign entities.

Josh:
They are no longer allowed to serve tokens to anybody.

Josh:
And then there's this nuance worth noting where U.S. citizens and green card

Josh:
holders and other certain protected individuals are exempt from this deemed

Josh:
export rule, but it gets really messy.

Josh:
And it's just this incredibly complicated and impossible situation that I would

Josh:
imagine for Anthropics to navigate because you just can't really tell.

Josh:
So as a result, the models are gone.

Josh:
And we're in this weird limbo period now where the frontier model has actually

Josh:
been removed and the frontier for the first time ever like you mentioned it's

Josh:
actually moved backwards a notch instead of forwards in terms of public facing

Josh:
capability and that's been

Josh:
it's set a really interesting and kind of like unnerving precedent as we move

Josh:
forward through this like as we navigate through this new world that we're going through

Ejaaz:
Well i mean this isn't the first time that anthropic and the government have

Ejaaz:
got into a fight these guys have had a relationship they have they have a past

Ejaaz:
and i think it's important to kind of like recap what that past looks like.

Ejaaz:
So literally in the last 12 months, Anthropic has got into spats and fights

Ejaaz:
with the government, disagreements, and they're trying to kind of resolve their outcomes.

Ejaaz:
But there's a bit of bitterness between the two.

Ejaaz:
So I think running through this, Feb 27th, 2026, so that's literally,

Ejaaz:
you know, a couple of months ago, there was a federal blacklist that was put out for Anthropic.

Ejaaz:
Now, the reason why this surfaced was Anthropic's models were being used by

Ejaaz:
the Pentagon or the Department of War to carry out military operations,

Ejaaz:
to design and strategize around how they execute on that.

Ejaaz:
And this was the first known instance. CLAWD was the default model that was

Ejaaz:
used by every single government institute.

Ejaaz:
Anthropic expressed disdain and disinterest in this, saying that,

Ejaaz:
you know, there should be more regulation about this. There should be more transparent comms.

Ejaaz:
The government did not like that. They got into a back and forth about it.

Ejaaz:
They tried to come to an agreement. Ultimately, they did not.

Ejaaz:
And the government's response was to blacklist Anthropics models.

Ejaaz:
Now, what the blacklist basically looked like was no government entity is allowed

Ejaaz:
to use Claude. They can't use it.

Ejaaz:
And they started signing partnerships with Anthropics rivals such as,

Ejaaz:
XAI, OpenAI, and Google. Now, since then, they've reverted back on that.

Ejaaz:
Why? Because Anthropic created this new model called Mythos 5,

Ejaaz:
which was originally restricted. The original Mythos Preview model was ready.

Ejaaz:
Around this time, actually, I think like in February or maybe just after that.

Ejaaz:
And it's been kind of like within restricted boundaries for a while.

Ejaaz:
And then we have this new safeguarded version, Fable 5, which is also more advanced

Ejaaz:
than Preview that has been publicly released and then withdrawn.

Ejaaz:
And so since then, the government has kind of gone back on their word and saying,

Ejaaz:
well, actually, because this model is so powerful, we need to understand how

Ejaaz:
to harden our own security systems. So they've worked with Anthropic.

Ejaaz:
And it's been kind of like this bittersweet sort of relationship.

Ejaaz:
And finally, when Anthropic started to file for an IPO confidentially and publicly

Ejaaz:
released this new model, apparently, according to reports, the government didn't

Ejaaz:
want them to publicly release it.

Ejaaz:
But Anthropic was like, we need to do this. we need to give this to the public,

Ejaaz:
we'll give you a safe version of this.

Ejaaz:
Like, look at how restrictive our safeguards are. You can't get behind this.

Ejaaz:
And then when this jailbreak was exposed to the government, this was the final

Ejaaz:
line drawn and they've gone back on it and basically saying,

Ejaaz:
I'd probably ban this or there'll be repercussions. And that's what I've probably just had to do.

Josh:
Yeah. And now might be an interesting time to actually note the specifics of

Josh:
what they deemed unsafe in order to cause this ban to happen,

Josh:
because it wasn't just like, oh no we don't like this this is a ban it was actually

Josh:
came in the form of a perceived jail break so the report is that

Josh:
someone who we kind of may might have an idea of it's been publicly reported

Josh:
that we might have an idea of someone someone credible reported a jailbreak

Josh:
to united states government and that is the thing that they blamed it on and

Josh:
like you mentioned i find this really

Josh:
troubling and difficult to wrap my head around because so much of the backlash that came from

Josh:
fable five being released was the fact that it was so sensitive to these bio

Josh:
threats it was so sensitive to cyber security that it actually wouldn't answer

Josh:
a lot of questions that were adjacent like i remember, EJ, as you mentioned,

Josh:
you asked, what is mitochondria?

Josh:
And it couldn't even answer that because it was related to bio.

Josh:
So it routed it through Opus 4.8, the safer model that you know you could trust the safeguards from.

Josh:
So there was every effort in the world to go through and make sure that this

Josh:
was safe enough to be released to the public and then give the public access

Josh:
to this amazing frontier model. That way it wasn't gatekept and held privately

Josh:
only for a specific set of companies that are in Project Glasswing.

Josh:
This clearly wasn't enough. There was an alleged jail break that was discovered

Josh:
that was reported to the government. The government said, no,

Josh:
no, no, we can't have this and then went to anthropic and that's where the problems started

Ejaaz:
I mean, at this point, we should probably reveal who broke the news to the government

Ejaaz:
that led to Anthropic needing to ban their models.

Ejaaz:
It was none other than Amazon, specifically the CEO, Andy Jassy.

Ejaaz:
So to give some context here, Amazon

Ejaaz:
is, if not, I think it's the biggest individual investor in Anthropic.

Ejaaz:
They own around 17% to 20%, but they're also their main cloud partner.

Ejaaz:
All of the chip and card infrastructure that is used to train inference and

Ejaaz:
distribute Claude to all government partners, Enterprise, which,

Ejaaz:
by the way, is Anthropic's biggest revenue income provider, as well as retail,

Ejaaz:
kind of is facilitated through AWS, through Amazon's cloud service.

Ejaaz:
So a major alignment between these two companies.

Ejaaz:
Andy Jassy has a security team, and they were testing out Claude Fable,

Ejaaz:
specifically its safeguards, and they surfaced a potential jailbreak which could be exploited by China.

Ejaaz:
Now, if you're Andy Jassy, you have two decisions to make here.

Ejaaz:
You have probably some form of a government obligation because they've done

Ejaaz:
work with a lot of the government officials to reach out to them and say,

Ejaaz:
hey, there's this jailbreak, by the way. Let's work on this to fix this with Anthropic.

Ejaaz:
And then you're a major investor in Anthropic. You should go to them and say,

Ejaaz:
hey, by the way, there's this jailbreak. Let's try and fix this.

Ejaaz:
Andy Jassy could have gone to both people. He just went to one.

Ejaaz:
It was the government and the Department of Commerce, but I think also the Department

Ejaaz:
of War specifically and said, hey, if China gets access to this particular jailbreak

Ejaaz:
that we found, there's going to be an issue.

Ejaaz:
So Pete Hexeth and Secretary Scott Besson.

Ejaaz:
Panic. And they're like, okay, this jailbreak is real. They validate it internally.

Ejaaz:
And they reach out to Anthropic within the hour. And they basically say,

Ejaaz:
hey, we found this jailbreak. We need to speak to Dario.

Ejaaz:
Now, the funniest part about all of these reports is apparently Dario was at

Ejaaz:
a wellness retreat. Now, I don't know if that is true, but he was unreachable

Ejaaz:
for about an hour and 15 minutes to which he then responded,

Ejaaz:
got on a call with the government, and they had this discussion.

Ejaaz:
Now, Dario had a very important statement to make, which was.

Ejaaz:
If this is a jailbreak, it's likely a non-universal jailbreak.

Ejaaz:
Now, there's two types of jailbreaks. There's universal and non-universal.

Ejaaz:
A non-universal jailbreak is a hyper-localized specific jailbreak that only

Ejaaz:
a few niche actors, if they wanted to exploit it, could end up doing.

Ejaaz:
A universal jailbreak is usually the ones that people get scared about,

Ejaaz:
where anyone and everyone with access to Claude Fable, for instance,

Ejaaz:
would be able to get around it and go to the restricted version.

Ejaaz:
What Dario was saying is this is a very specific instance that not really a

Ejaaz:
lot of people know about. And we can patch and it's not really a big deal.

Ejaaz:
We don't need to impose a worldwide ban on people that aren't American individuals.

Ejaaz:
We can fix this. China's not going to get access to this.

Ejaaz:
And reportedly, there's been a back and forth where, again, both of these entities,

Ejaaz:
Anthropic and the government, can't come to an agreeance on any of this.

Josh:
Yeah, it's a lot of like finger pointing and speculation.

Josh:
And we're trying to like piece together the puzzle based on these public reports

Josh:
from news publications but we do have some official commentary from anthropic

Josh:
themselves they published a blog post all about it and just

Josh:
to kind of double click on that jailbreak feature they walked through exactly

Josh:
what happened and their take on what happened and they said no testers have

Josh:
been able to find a universal jailbreak like you mentioned a jailbreak method

Josh:
that can very broadly bypass the model safeguards

Josh:
unlocking a wide range of cyber capabilities so they said we suspect that perfect

Josh:
jailbreak resistance is not currently possible for any model provider.

Josh:
Every safeguard used in the industry is vulnerable to non-universal jailbreaks,

Josh:
which can elicit some cyber information in specific circumstances,

Josh:
and it is likely that universal jailbreaks will eventually be found in the future.

Josh:
And they stated this clearly when they released Fable 5. Given that perfect

Josh:
jailbreak resistance does not appear to be widely possible today,

Josh:
Anthropic adopted a defense in-depth strategy with Fable 5, where they aimed

Josh:
to make jailbreaks either narrow...

Josh:
In the case of non-trivial jailbreaks or very expensive to produce.

Josh:
So the average person is just not going to be able to do this.

Josh:
And then they combine this with this monitoring to detect and shut down any successful attacks.

Josh:
So they're saying, hey, it's not possible to protect a jailbreak from any model.

Josh:
Like all of these models are susceptible to them, but they're susceptible to

Josh:
them on a very narrow band in which it can be detected and then quickly shut down.

Josh:
And if your basis for shutting down a model is on one of these narrow jailbreaks

Josh:
that is available across every model, then that is unfair and improper.

Josh:
It's kind of the argument that they're making.

Josh:
And that logic seems to make sense. Like if you go on X, there's this guy,

Josh:
Pliny the Liberator, I think his name is. And he always has these very like

Josh:
weird, obscure, narrow use cases in which you can get the model to say funny

Josh:
things that like it's not really supposed to say.

Josh:
But that is a novel case that is narrow in scope. And a lot of his accounts get shut down.

Josh:
It's not a broad facing, you could almost say malware, where there's like a

Josh:
prompt that I could put into my LLM and then it will surface me these unfiltered

Josh:
results and that's kind of where the discrepancies are it feels like anthropics is like

Josh:
dude you guys don't understand like we we know this model we understand the

Josh:
risk we've been very public about the risks of this here's what we're doing

Josh:
to stop them here is how we put in the safeguards

Josh:
And the government is saying, oh, no, but there is risk. And because there's

Josh:
a non-zero percent chance of risk, you got to shut this whole thing down.

Josh:
And they're like, no, but this is this every model has risk.

Josh:
That's the nature of the technology.

Josh:
And for some reason, in this instance, there's a zero tolerance policy for this.

Josh:
And therefore, there's no availability currently to actually use the model.

Ejaaz:
I think it's important to understand like both parties' sides of the stories, right?

Ejaaz:
Like if you're the government, right, your default thinking is if a tool,

Ejaaz:
an unrestricted version of this tool gets into the wrong hands,

Ejaaz:
they could hack our government databases and get access to really important

Ejaaz:
information about military operations.

Ejaaz:
Stuff that we're doing that we don't want our adversaries to know about,

Ejaaz:
security access, all these kinds of things which could be used against them.

Ejaaz:
And their kind of view is these adversaries do not care. They have no kind of

Ejaaz:
like maybe moral ethics around any of this. They're not going to be like,

Ejaaz:
oh, okay, well, yeah, this model could be super dangerous.

Ejaaz:
They're just going to use it, right? And so they take a strict kind of like,

Ejaaz:
black or white policy where if there's any kind of possibility or chance for

Ejaaz:
this to happen, they're going to put a ban on it until they figure out what that fix is.

Ejaaz:
And on the tropic side, they're like, hey, listen, we are the experts in knowing

Ejaaz:
how to protect against this.

Ejaaz:
You need to give more weight to our wording, like to our voice,

Ejaaz:
rather than just outright kind of like ban it.

Ejaaz:
So I see, like, even if there's a 1% chance that this could potentially happen,

Ejaaz:
that 1%, if it does happen, could be catastrophic for the entire kind of,

Ejaaz:
like, world in the government's kind of view.

Ejaaz:
Now, the funny thing about this is, before we started recording...

Ejaaz:
Josh, you mentioned that usually when you have a product release,

Ejaaz:
that's specifically software, the jailbreaks, they come out pretty quickly, right?

Ejaaz:
And that happened in the case of Claude Fable. When it got released,

Ejaaz:
there were one or two jailbreaks.

Ejaaz:
One was discovered by playing the Liberator that you just mentioned,

Ejaaz:
but the other one was this one.

Ejaaz:
I want to give you guys an idea of this is an example of a non-universal jailbreak

Ejaaz:
where you can share your ideas of prompts and examples of how to use a model

Ejaaz:
on a public forum, on a public domain, right?

Ejaaz:
And what one individual realized is the way that these safeguards are set up.

Ejaaz:
So Claude Fable 5 is frustrating or was frustrating to a lot of people because

Ejaaz:
you couldn't ask simple questions about biology, chemistry.

Ejaaz:
How a model works, or even how you might want to build a model,

Ejaaz:
because there were strict safeguards put in place saying that you might be using

Ejaaz:
this for nefarious purposes.

Ejaaz:
Therefore, I'm going to re-divert you to an old model Claude Opus 4.8.

Ejaaz:
And that annoyed a lot of people. So people tried to kind of circumvent that barrier.

Ejaaz:
And what one person realized was there is an AI model reviewer for every single

Ejaaz:
request, and you could inject malicious code or malicious prompts just by triggering

Ejaaz:
that safeguard intentionally.

Ejaaz:
And I'm not going to walk through how this works, but the idea is they're kind

Ejaaz:
of like walk-arounds about how all of these different exploits could potentially happen.

Ejaaz:
And it ranges from like low risk and hyper localized to high risk and like accessible

Ejaaz:
to all. And like at this end is where like the highest risk kind of sits.

Ejaaz:
And that's how the government is treating this current jailbreak that they discovered.

Ejaaz:
The issue is like, I want to know what this jailbreak is. I want to know what Amazon discovered.

Ejaaz:
And I want to know that, you know, what the details of that were.

Ejaaz:
Because if we do have information on that, we'll have an idea of where on that

Ejaaz:
spectrum that I just described, this sits, and it'll inform whether the stance

Ejaaz:
that the government took was actually valid or whether it's not at all.

Josh:
Yeah, and there's some weird things going on with this, this one in particular,

Josh:
because of that history between Anthropik and the government,

Josh:
it seems like there is a very low tolerance and low empathy towards the company.

Josh:
I mean, we had, there was this funny post from Pete Hegseth,

Josh:
the Department of War, the person who's in charge of the Department of War,

Josh:
actually got community noted here, where he was making a comment that said three

Josh:
months ago, the Department of War kicked Anthropik out of the building forever.

Josh:
And then the community note is saying the official statement is not accurate

Josh:
or truthful the department of war didn't kick out anthropic forever they invited

Josh:
anthropic back when they launched the mythos model and even continue to use

Josh:
mythos and high stakes military ops so there's a lot of

Josh:
i don't want to say like psyoping but there's like a lot of social um signaling

Josh:
that's happening that is probably getting in the way of what actually happened

Josh:
at the core and i think that's something that

Josh:
i'm most interested in is is like what's actually going on behind the scenes

Josh:
that is triggering these because anthropic as an entity has said publicly that

Josh:
they that the government should have the power to um

Josh:
Kind of make governmental decisions it's just through a transparent statutory

Josh:
process like something that people can follow something that people can understand

Josh:
and this seems very opaque where there's a lot of finger pointing and there's

Josh:
a lot of name calling and community notes is saying like hey the stuff that

Josh:
you're saying actually it's not true and you're being a little like hyperbolic

Josh:
about how you address this stuff

Josh:
And it sets this kind of dangerous precedent because we are at this point in time

Josh:
in which the AI labs and the federal government are

Josh:
like at odds with each other in a way that is not productive.

Josh:
It's like the AI labs, they feel like the whiz kid child who is like in class,

Josh:
they're the genius, they know everything, they understand the ins and outs,

Josh:
and they're trying to say...

Josh:
How they plan to deploy this in a way that is safe and is good for the public

Josh:
as we move forward. And then it's the government, who is perhaps the teacher,

Josh:
who has been around for a long time, has all the authority in the room as it

Josh:
relates to our country or in the classroom.

Josh:
And they're saying, no, you don't understand. We've been here before.

Josh:
This is not how this works. I make the decisions.

Josh:
I'm going to tell you how this is done. And those two things are at odds.

Josh:
And the student is growing very powerful.

Josh:
And the government or the teacher in this case has the power.

Josh:
And they're just continuing to sort of clash in these ways that are now harming

Josh:
the public. Like I loved using Fable 5. It was an incredible model I used every single day.

Josh:
And now it's gone. And that really sucks. That seems to be the dynamic that

Josh:
we're stuck in now. It's just these two ideas at odds.

Josh:
And our producer, Luke, actually, he made this great comment earlier before

Josh:
we were recording that I thought was interesting.

Josh:
It's like, well, a lot of the people in government, they're like,

Josh:
make America great again, like looking backwards to kind of cherry pick the

Josh:
best parts of it, And then getting back to that.

Josh:
And these AI labs are kind of like, wait a second, like we actually,

Josh:
we're doing really great work and we are looking to make things great in a new way.

Josh:
And it seems like those two things have been at odds with each other is kind

Josh:
of the view that seems like it makes the most sense right now.

Ejaaz:
I think fear drives a lot of it, right? You automatically default to thinking

Ejaaz:
about the worst case scenario and then chastising whoever is creating or distributing

Ejaaz:
the tool that could potentially be dangerous, right?

Ejaaz:
So you kind of like slam your face down and you say like, no,

Ejaaz:
we're making this crazy decision to shut it down until we can figure out what

Ejaaz:
the best move is going forwards. That being said.

Ejaaz:
Whether it was Anthropic that came out with this frontier model that posed itself

Ejaaz:
as a threat, or it was OpenAI or Google or Elon Musk's ex-AI,

Ejaaz:
it would have inevitably happened because a big transition has happened over the last year where

Ejaaz:
the attack vector isn't software code anymore.

Ejaaz:
Number one, no one's writing code anymore, or at least at the top level.

Ejaaz:
They're using AIs to do it all for them, and the AI is being used to check the code themselves.

Ejaaz:
So that means that humans themselves have less of a good understanding as to

Ejaaz:
the code that is being written, less of a good understanding how the code actually

Ejaaz:
works, and then less of a good understanding how the weaknesses are surfaced and exploited itself.

Ejaaz:
So you're kind of like relying more and more increasingly on an AI model.

Ejaaz:
The second thing is the attack vector is no longer code specifically, it's words.

Ejaaz:
We spoke about the meta exploit, I think, like.

Ejaaz:
One and a half weeks ago, where someone stole $8 million worth of Instagram

Ejaaz:
accounts, just because they sweet talked Meta's AI assistant into giving them

Ejaaz:
the keys or resetting the password and sending a setting their email as the

Ejaaz:
kind of like main account owner.

Ejaaz:
And they resold those accounts for like millions of dollars,

Ejaaz:
including Obama's White House official account.

Ejaaz:
So the point being is, we are transitioning from like a world where it's like

Ejaaz:
hard coded zero in ones to a world where you can just like kind of sweet talk

Ejaaz:
an AI and kind of coax it into figuring it out. And that's not stopping.

Ejaaz:
The air models are going to keep releasing, whether publicly or privately.

Ejaaz:
And we need to figure out a way to eventually distribute this technology because

Ejaaz:
it's going to improve facets of every single industry.

Ejaaz:
So if we assume that is the case, you kind of want to see a government that

Ejaaz:
takes a more proactive approach in terms of helping figure out what this framework looks like.

Ejaaz:
And listen, in the government's defense, maybe that's what they're trying to do.

Ejaaz:
Like you said earlier, we don't know the discussions that are happening behind

Ejaaz:
the scenes. I would love to be a fly on the wall, but we don't know.

Ejaaz:
So maybe they're trying to figure out a framework that allows them to re-release

Ejaaz:
Fable 5 to everyone, or maybe they tweak a certain safeguard depending on what

Ejaaz:
that jailbreak specifically is.

Ejaaz:
But the jailbreaks aren't going away because we haven't figured out this new

Ejaaz:
wild west of how prompting works or how to defend against a nefarious attacker

Ejaaz:
that distills an account using a foreign API that gets to query Anthropic,

Ejaaz:
even though legally they're not able to do it.

Ejaaz:
Anthropic hasn't figured this out. Google, OpenAI, Anthropic have all been distillation

Ejaaz:
attacked by Chinese entities, by Chinese AI labs over the last couple of months.

Ejaaz:
So how do we stop that? We haven't figured that out just yet. And,

Ejaaz:
if we assume that these AI models are getting more powerful,

Ejaaz:
which they are increasingly at a frequent rate every couple of months now,

Ejaaz:
you need to kind of take a more proactive approach. You can't just kind of like,

Ejaaz:
the genie's out the bottle. You can't put it back here.

Josh:
And I have to ask the question of like, what happened if this was a different AI lab?

Josh:
Like Anthropic is the most safety focused company in the world.

Josh:
And their entire ethos is built around safety and security.

Josh:
What happens if this was open AI or was Gemini?

Josh:
Would it have been treated as seriously or is this just a vendetta that they

Josh:
have it's a it's really interesting to think about

Josh:
the implications if this was someone else and and it creates this kind of like

Josh:
bummer of a precedent where because anthropic went first because they tried

Josh:
their best to make it safe but they released this new frontier model

Josh:
they were the one to face all the penalties and if if open ai for example had

Josh:
released a mythos class model first

Josh:
would they have felt the backlash of it and does it create this precedent where

Josh:
maybe you should keep the models private for longer because you don't have to

Josh:
deal with the public repercussions of it.

Josh:
You don't have to deal with not only the backlash, but then the actual government

Josh:
slamming down the hammer on you.

Josh:
And who you're allowed to serve this model to and not. So does this create this

Josh:
like slowed precedent in which AI models and AI labs are kind of incentivized

Josh:
to keep their model private for longer because they don't want to be the first mover.

Josh:
They don't want to push the frontier forward because of the backlash and downstream

Josh:
implications of that. And what does that mean for the industry at large?

Josh:
Is that going to push people towards more open source models?

Josh:
Are they going to want to kind of have more control because the uncertainty

Josh:
of these public facing closed models is there like what if you build your business on

Josh:
the next version of fable or chat gpt 9.0 or something and at any given time

Josh:
it could be pulled out from underneath you it sets this like really challenging

Josh:
and difficult precedent that

Josh:
hopefully i mean like with the department of war saga earlier in the year

Josh:
we'll start to build a new framework in which companies can move forward to

Josh:
and stand on a little bit more stable ground but for now we're sitting in this limbo where

Josh:
the best model in the world is is only available for the private government

Josh:
and for private companies, and it is not available to the public,

Josh:
and that's just kind of a bummer.

Josh:
And I hope coming out of this, we start to build a better understanding of where

Josh:
everyone stands and what's allowed and what's not.

Ejaaz:
To draw a bit of a silver lining on this as we round this episode up, and this might be,

Ejaaz:
I think it's ultimately good that it is happening in the way that it's happening right now,

Ejaaz:
because typically these conversations around potential nationalization of a

Ejaaz:
government, you know, government taking equity stakes and controlling how technology

Ejaaz:
is built in their own domain.

Ejaaz:
Happens behind closed doors.

Ejaaz:
Like we don't usually have a public outwards facing type situation.

Ejaaz:
But, you know, thankfully, we have Anthropic that is not only at the frontier,

Ejaaz:
but they are openly speaking about this in blog posts, in commentary online,

Ejaaz:
and trying to keep us up to date with, you know, their different stances and

Ejaaz:
how the government is responding to that.

Ejaaz:
And as a result, the government has to engage publicly.

Ejaaz:
And that gives the public an idea of, number one, how dangerous these bottles

Ejaaz:
are. Number two, what's being restricted and prevented for them.

Ejaaz:
And then number three, how this might shape a framework of interacting with

Ejaaz:
future more powerful AI models?

Ejaaz:
I don't think the debate or question is really about Fable 5 at all at this

Ejaaz:
point. It's about, you know, the future powerful AI models that we haven't created

Ejaaz:
just yet that are currently undergoing training. You know, who gets access to that?

Ejaaz:
How is it determined? Is it by race, creed, nationality, income bracket?

Ejaaz:
Like, what does that look like?

Ejaaz:
And starting to have those discussions is now, right now, is net-net very good for us.

Ejaaz:
And I think that, if it wasn't anthropic, it'll also maybe happening with OpenAI

Ejaaz:
or Google, and I hope we start to see more of these happen between government

Ejaaz:
and AI labs, because I think the public forum of discussion is very important here.

Josh:
Yeah, we're very much witnessing history. This is another week in which we are

Josh:
going to establish new precedents for how things move forward in the world of

Josh:
AI. So it feels like every week there's something.

Josh:
There's something huge that happens that is changing, that is like creating

Josh:
history or altering it. And this is no different than that. So that's the update.

Josh:
If you're watching this, you currently can't use Fable. Hopefully that changes

Josh:
soon. Hopefully we establish some new precedents.

Josh:
But yeah, it's a really interesting story that is still ongoing and evolving.

Josh:
So as we get updates, we will continue to share them on the show.

Josh:
But I think that's the update for today. EJ, anything else that you wanted to

Josh:
add or that we missed or that's noteworthy?

Ejaaz:
No, but I do have a prompt. Now, it's funny. Typically, the prompt for every

Ejaaz:
episode is, hey, we have this new feature, this new model. Tell us what you're using it for.

Ejaaz:
I want you to tell us what you miss from Claude Fable. For those of you who

Ejaaz:
had access to it, who were using it, what do you miss the most?

Ejaaz:
What's the difference that you're noticing more now that you're using an older model 4.8?

Ejaaz:
Like, you know, where's that gap? Like kind of tell us in the comments or DM

Ejaaz:
us or whatever that might be.

Ejaaz:
Tell us, you know, what you were using Fable 5 for and why like this gap,

Ejaaz:
this restriction is kind of bad for you. Or maybe it's useful for you.

Ejaaz:
Maybe you've realized Opus 4.8 is actually a better model in many ways and that

Ejaaz:
you don't really need the Frontier model.

Ejaaz:
That might be a hot take, but let us know in the comments. But aside from that,

Ejaaz:
thank you so much for listening.

Ejaaz:
For those of you out there listening to this right now who aren't subscribed

Ejaaz:
or haven't left us a comment, please do so. We get hundreds of comments on every

Ejaaz:
single episode. We read every single one of them.

Ejaaz:
Maybe Joshua and I replied to every one of them. I don't know.

Ejaaz:
You need to find out. Maybe you need to post a reply.

Ejaaz:
And if you haven't rated us on Spotify or Apple Music or wherever you listen

Ejaaz:
to us, please do give us a five star rating. It helps us out massively.

Ejaaz:
And aside from that, we will see you on the next one.

Josh:
Awesome. See you guys tomorrow.