5 thoughts on US ban of Claude Fable 5
This was supposed to be a very different email.
Hey, y’all -- Sherveen here. I was originally intending to send out 5 thoughts about the strengths, weaknesses, and nuances of Anthropic’s latest model release, Fable 5, but the model has been taken offline after US government action as of last night.
This is a really big deal, so here are 5 morning-after thoughts about what happens next.
Let me first summarize the chain of events:
The US government (Commerce, for some reason) issued a directive to Anthropic on Friday afternoon placing an export control on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to “suspend all access […] by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.”
The government presented what Anthropic is calling a trivial jailbreaking technique. (Jailbreak: bypass a model’s safeguards to get it to do things it isn’t supposed to). Anthropic reviewed a demo of the vulnerability and says this jailbreak is not novel, and many modern models would fall for it.
To comply with this directive would be complicated, so for now, Anthropic has removed access for Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users.
Of course, unrelated-but-related is that the White House and Department of Defense have previously feuded with Anthropic, calling them a “radical-left, woke company.”
There are other rumors or latchings-on, but let’s stick with that fact set for now. Okay, moving on to five thoughts as to what this all means…
1. We’re in an immediate and dire expertise crisis
It cannot be overstated that the US admin probably has no idea whether or not the jailbreak in question is a serious vulnerability. The so-called AI experts that advise the White House are mostly venture capitalists, not AI practitioners, and jailbreaks are a known attack vector for models.
They’re not, by themselves, a huge deal.
They typically look like a set of instructions or prompts you give to a model that “unlock” the safeguards. Some people produce jailbreaks for research, others do it because they want the model to violate content boundaries (ex. to produce sexual content or talk about restricted topics).
But Fable 5 was one of the most guardrailed models we’ve seen from the frontier labs (PDF, Fable 5 system card).
Its classifier (a mini model that evaluates your prompts for safety) was aggressive at limiting sensitive topics, and so for users to rely on a jailbreak for some negative mission would be easier with older Anthropic or OpenAI models.
Anthropic’s understanding is that it might have been another company that brought the jailbreak to the government, causing this reaction, so we can speculate that this is not the result of some intensive screening process meant for screening models at the national level.
2. Export controls are not the right mechanism, for a variety of reasons
We don’t have the exact details, but placing an export control on the use of models by foreign nationals is extremely sloppy, at best, and weirdly xenophobic and self-defeating, at worst.
It becomes self-evident how stupid this is with just a few implications:
It implies that we’ll have to offer proof of citizenry to use the most powerful AI models, since this is about foreign nationals both inside and outside the US, requiring companies to put together draconian auth systems.
It implies that key AI researchers and executives won’t be allowed to access these models. Some public examples are straightforward, but where there’s ambiguity about people’s citizenship status, it’s almost precisely the point that I should warn the below list might be out-of-date or inaccurate…
Andrej Karpathy (co-founder, OpenAI, Tesla AI, now at Anthropic)
Ilya Sutskever (co-founder, OpenAI, Safe Superintelligence Inc.)
Key members of the Anthropic team, including Chris Olah (co-founder, Anthropic), Rahul Patil (CTO, Anthropic), Amanda Askell (alignment lead, Anthropic)
Mustafa Suleyman (CEO, Microsoft AI)
Demis Hassabis (Co-founder, DeepMind [Google]); DeepMind is based in the UK, but export controls issued to Google would make them liable for global enforcement
It implies that we’re entering a framework where citizenry will now be used to enforce limits on business in the United States, and where companies will be incentivized to scare the government into action against competitors.
Which obviously also triggers frameworks and concerns re: the rights of people generally and their access to frontier AI, versus the rights of Americans, versus the rights of Americans on American soil.
It places the export burden on a company building a model, while ignoring that we export the capability to build competing models through our industry’s international selling of chips and other key pieces of the AI supply chain.
Nationality is just a terrible proxy for model abuse risk.
3. This will permanently slow down our access to frontier AI models
If companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have to be concerned about random directives from the US government, this will have a huge chilling effect on how comfortable they’ll feel in releasing iterations of models for general access.
Think about it this way: without warning, millions of Anthropic customers lost access to the model they’ve been enjoying for the past few days. This represents hundreds of millions of dollars in probable lost revenue, if not billions in market cap.
If the government had a clearly-laid-out, bipartisan approach to model safety, with a third party auditing system (as Anthropic itself has often suggested), then directives like this could come while models are being finalized, or at least with a warning period to enable the model makers and their customers to adjust.
Expect model-makers to be far more hesitant to give the general public access to the latest models that they’ll have access to themselves, or offer up to their closest partners and customers.
We won’t even know about the conversations happening behind the scenes about how to adjust to this new reality. This is bad for us all.
4. No, Anthropic didn’t “ask for this”
I shouldn’t be surprised at this, but the number of people on the tech right, even people against AI safety enforcement, tweeting that this is something Anthropic was asking for — both literally and through its behavior — is astonishing.
I mean, let me just be frank: there are lots of arguments you could try to make for this, but revealing yourself to have the intellectual horsepower of a pig with a concussion by making this particular argument… it’s certainly a choice.
There are two common flavors of this argument:
“Well, Anthropic has literally said that the government should regulate frontier AI, they’re just mad it’s happening to them.”
No, Anthropic has said the government should have the power to do so scoped to specific risks, in light of third party assessment, and through a process that stands above any favoritism. In fact, here’s Dario on this, verbatim:
The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined, in light of third-party assessment, to present unacceptable risks. This power must be scoped to the above four specific risks and there must be protective measures against political favoritism or arbitrary decisions.
This isn’t that. In fact, it’s far more likely that this is political favoritism in the form of the admin’s particular disdain for Anthropic, given that Fable 5 — by any in-industry expert measure — is very good, but not that much more capable than GPT-5.5.
The other flavor of this argument:
“Well, Anthropic keeps doing fear-based marketing, saying that the model will take our jobs or could be used for a bioweapon. Look at what they’re wearing. They asked for this!”
Anthropic is indeed in a weird game theory scenario. They both believe the technology they are building could be used for bad ends, and are building one of the best versions of that technology.
You can disagree with them, but these two things are not at conflict with each other. The thing that I most dislike about mainstream AI discourse is it gives no credit to Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, or Demis Hassabis for being honest about the risks they see. We should be praising them for talking out loud about how their companies and technologies could have side effects or be used maliciously.
Because…
You can think that AI might wind up being amazing for human quality of life, medicine, new methods of travel, science, resource abundance, etc.
While also thinking that, if it isn’t built with guardrails, or is only in the hands of the few, it could go in the wrong direction and cause harm
While also knowing that there’s a “messy middle” where we don’t know where jobs are going, or robotics, but that they’re going to change
While also being aware that this is a race against other countries or groups building this very same technology
Therefore leading you to conclude that, because you’re excited about the upsides and want to limit the downsides, you should be the one to build it
And for those of you who are going to say something like… “well, no, you could also decide to try to slow it down, that’s the other choice!”
Sam, Dario, and Demis are also the only credible people who repeatedly state that, if a proper international process could be put in place, they would be in support of a slowdown or at least cross-company, cross-government coordination.
They also know they aren’t the ones with the authority to make that happen, so you can’t exactly blame them when you should be blaming the rest of society for being incapable of having that discussion!
Bottom line -- unless this is part of a yet-to-be-revealed Dario masterplan to get people to join him on a “government should ban AI” superbus, no, this isn’t what they asked for.
If I tell you that we should imprison criminals if we have evidence they committed a crime... and this would help us deal with things like murder, robbery, etc. And then I imprison you because... someone told me you might have jaywalked...
Would anyone seriously argue that you ‘asked for it’?
5. Lots of bad suggestions are being made… be careful!
Pay close attention to what narratives you get caught up in next, lest we as a society or any person as an individual supports a movement that isn’t good for us.
For example, some people are saying this is part of the inevitable march of nationalizing the AI labs. That’s a great way to get everyone smart to quit the AI labs. Many of these people are libertarians who would detest the idea that they should build something that the government gets to control directly, even if they are in support of AI safety regimes.
Also, most of them are immigrants or first- or second-generation, and would disavow a nationality-based approach to building AI. This is a great way to encourage them to leave and build AI elsewhere.
Some others are suggesting that open source AI is the only solution — that private companies controlling their own models won’t work, and so we need companies to release the models for everyone to run on their own.
There are many flaws with this thinking, but I’ll start with the obvious: the economics of OpenAI and Anthropic (and their ability to charge for closed, frontier models) are what give them the capability to be building this frontier. There’s a reason many of the Chinese labs that were previously open sourcing are now making their models private and charging for access.
Okay, those are my 5 thoughts for now.
It’s a complicated time. This technology is new, and uncertainty is high. I’m not some AI accelerationist, I do think AI safety is important, and yet, like most people, I don’t trust this administration to be taking this action in good faith.
I’m not sure how we solve the particular problem of “having conversation,” where we can talk openly, without accusations and oligarchic incentive, about the dynamics of AI, from safety to labor impacts to art and beyond. But I hate to point out that, as hard as it sounds, it’s essential.
Until then, I’ll just end by saying that Fable 5 was a pretty darn good model. On a practical basis, it was the first model in a long while that made Claude Code feel almost as good to use as Codex and GPT-5.5. Its agentic capability and discernment meant that it was good at tool-calling and orienting itself on long-horizon tasks, and Opus 4.8 felt like it could often get lost or need to trial-and-error its way through.
So, here we are.
With our sad state of affairs, I’ve got my passport on my kitchen counter ready for an upload, hoping I can use it again soon.
Importing intelligence,
Sherveen