# The Fable 5 Crisis Continues — Transcript (2026-06-15)

https://aidailybrief.ai/e/2026-06-15 · Listen: https://pod.link/1680633614

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Today on the AI Daily Brief, As the work week starts without resolution, the Fable 5 crisis continues. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in.

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Welcome back toToday we are picking up where we left off

in the chaotic saga of Anthropic versus the White House around Fable 5



For those just getting up to speed, on Friday night

The United States issued an export control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 to any foreign nationals

Given the breadth of that order, the onlychoice that Anthropic had in their estimation was to take the model down entirely

now the first phase in the absence of better [00:01:00] information 

was stunned reactions and everyone casting about for who to blame



and while there might have been some partisans for either the Anthropic side or the US government side 

candidly no one was looking all that great I did an emergency episode on Saturday morning

the form of narrative construction as well as in the form of reporting

The first important post came from former AI czar David Sacks, who wrote: " I've had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true. As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.

Fable is Mythos with guardrails, but if those guardrails fail, then you've exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn't have them. Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyber weapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of 

Mythos 

Mythosand championed the guardrails on Fable.

If there is a vulnerability, big or small, it is Anthropic's responsibility to patch."

A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the US government [00:02:00] who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of these guardrails. 

the admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or deploy the model. Dario refused In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn't serious.



That is not what the trusted partner in the US government believe. Nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic's brand 

as the AI safety company. It's difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not serious.

In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety. In reaction, the admin issued the export control. The admin did this reluctantly.

It's been very surprised that Anthropic hasn't wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request, 

i.e., 

fixing the jailbreak issue. Anthropic's reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research company.

the admin's hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It [00:03:00] is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn't wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.

Finally, those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DOW Anthropic issues are wrong. The admin values Anthropic's technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic's court Now everyone saw that, everyone shared it, and everyone had something to say about it

There were some who took Sachs at face value. There were many more who viewed this as an act of narrative construction more than anything else And some were just outright skeptical entirely AI entrepreneur Eric Voorhees responded, " More likely story: the jailbreak wasn't super serious, a situation anyone who has ever received bug reports is familiar with. Anthropic thought the demand to halt the model was absurd, and the federal government used the opportunity to punish and humiliate Anthropic for the prior sins of not bending the knee.

Anthropic has more credibility on such topics than Washington



Now, if we take Saxe Post as the modern day equivalent of a press release, there are a few things worth noting

First, 

Sacks in numerous cases [00:04:00] paints Anthropic as hypocritical

Not only in that they're the safety company and not taking a safety issue seriously, but that they had marketed Mythos Weapon as a cyber weapon and then were surprised when it needed to be regulated as such

Sachs paints the administration as being reluctant to kneecap Anthropic

And in my estimation, paints two ways out of the situation

The first is in that second to last line. The admin feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. This is basically saying the ball is in Anthropic's court. In other words, Anthropic resolve this and we can move on

So what's the second way out of this? I don't think it should pass our notice 

when Sax stops talking about Anthropic and starts specifically talking about Dario Amodei himself, the admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or redeploy the model. Dario refused 

Now 

so far, no calls from the administration for Dario's resignation have come, although certainly that's been a subtext of some investor conversations and one strand of discourse on the internet

But by specifically targeting out Dario

I do think Sax is at least a little bit setting him up as a potential sacrificial lamb

Now [00:05:00] Anthropic's specific position restated from their Friday blog post

While not giving details of the specific jailbreak, 

they said, are basically arguing that the jailbreak that was shared with them was specific and discrete rather than universal

im-- And universal jailbreaks are what's really important

in language that was basically guaranteed to not help the situation

Anthropic went out of its way to talk about Perfect jailbreak resistance not appearing to be possible today

Still, the key thing as we try to understand what the administration saw

is Anthropic is basically saying that not all jailbreaks imply the same level of risk. Just because one narrow jailbreak is successful doesn't mean there's the ability to remove all guardrails. Think back to what these guardrails actually were. They were blocking everything from basic questions about mitochondria to any prompt with the word cancer.

If you manage to get the model to tell you that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, that's technically a jailbreak. However, it's also completely different to being able to use the model to build a bioweapon

But what about this highly credible trusted partner?

As I was finishing recording on Saturday morning

there were the first indications of who that trusted [00:06:00] partner was 

with that information getting filled out throughout the day. multiple outlets reported that Amazon was the unnamed trusted partner thatreported the jailbreak to the US government

Axios reports that Amazon contacted administration officials on Thursday night 

to share the issue

Using the precise sourced language reported by Axios, the report showed, quote, " How they were able to jailbreak and access portions of Anthropic's powerful new Mythos model that pose a national security threat." 

said,

sources said at Anthropic that they had notified the government multiple times prior to the June ninth release

And there were no objections. However, Axios reports that senior admin officials fielded calls from at least five other companies across Thursday night and Friday morning. This led officials to make the decision to shut down Fable, contacting Anthropic at one PM on Friday. Anthropic sources said they received notice that they had ninety minutes to take down Fable and Mythos due to a, quote, national security threat.

But the source also said that Anthropic received no details about the nature of the threat at that time

At 5:30, Anthropic received formal notice that Fable and Mythos would be subject to export controls that [00:07:00] barred access to all foreign nationals. Around 10:00 PM, Anthropic complied by taking down the two models Anthropic sources said that Dario Amodei and other executives spoke with the administration after that five thirty notification

According to the account provided to Axios, they laid out that the jailbreak was fairly simple, could be achieved with other models, and did not demonstrate a flaw with Fable's guardrails

Now, while Axios had mentioned the administration receiving a number of other calls

At least based on the best reporting that we have so far, it does seem like the decision to impose export controls was based pretty much solely on the Amazon report

despite those multiple tech companies placing calls to the administration, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy appears to have been the central figure. The Wall Street Journal reports that the decision to shut Fable 5 down was made after conversations between Jassy and key officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Amazon, for their part, aren't saying much, with a spokesperson stating, " As a leading cloud provider that serves a large number of private and public sector customers, it's not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks. When they occur, we [00:08:00] don't share details of these discussions."

The journal included numerous details about the contents of the report

Source to Andrew Morris, the founder of cybersecurity firm 

GrayNoise 

Intelligence

Reportedly, Amazon's researchers 

were able to use a jailbreak 

to make Fable discuss security bugs in at least four software platforms. the-- Morris commented that this is information that would typically be blocked by the guardrails, but was, quote, "Still a long way from dangerous cybersecurity information."

He noted that many other AI models can surface the same information The key difference that made Mythos a unique security risk was supposedly the ability to translate these vulnerabilities into functional exploit code. Now, Mora said that Amazon researchers had not presented evidence that they'd been able to get Fable to produce this type of code, which is blocked by the guardrails

There's also suggestion that the administration misinterpreted how severe the issue was

Writes the WSJ, " Jassy's calls to administration officials were viewed by some as a general warning that quickly escalated into a wide Commerce Department ban on foreign users accessing Mythos and Fable

Now, Politico added further details about [00:09:00] exactly who took part in the decision-making process

They wrote that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and White House Cyber Director 

Sean Carancross were the key administration figures leading the meeting where the decision was made

Bessent was apparently so critical to the AI policy decision that he joined the meeting remotely en route to an event in Houston

After the meeting, White House sources said they attempted to reach Dario Amodei, but were told he was unavailable because he was attending a wellness retreat

There is, as we will see, a lot of contention 

about that particular point

White House sources said that Amodei called the White House at around 1:00 PM, but Anthropic rejected this version of events, stating it was absolutely false. They noted that Amodei was first requested around noon and was on the phone within an hour and fifteen minutes. The company made other senior leaders available in the interim Once Amedei was available, he participated in three phone calls with around half a dozen officials.

In addition to Bessent, Wiles, and Cairncross, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick 

participated in the calls together with a handful of other senior Commerce and White House staff



worth-- now at this point it's worth [00:10:00] noting that President Trump's name hasn't been mentioned on the list of decision-makers. The only mention of Trump's involvement came from The Wall Street Journal writing, " President Trump later signed off on the action despite reservations about its hindering innovation."

As we will see, I think at this point, President Trump himself is basically the only primarily innovation concerned actor in the White House anymore

During the calls, writes Politico Amadei tried to clear up what he assumed was a misunderstanding. He pushed back on the administration's concerns defending the guardrails and argued that the type of bypass that occurred, which he believed to be specific, did not pose the same risk as a broader jailbreak that would allow it to be used without any of the guardrails put in place by Anthropic.

Karen Cross and Bessent were reportedly unconvinced by the argument.

One White House official said that Amazon's findings were run past the NSA, leading Cairncross and Bessant to feel that they had, quote-unquote, "proof." Government officials urged Anthropic to voluntarily withdraw the model and coordinate with the government to address vulnerabilities. Amodei reportedly requested more time and more information, to

refused to commit

to 

taking down the model 

Besson at one stage warned Amedei that he was making a [00:11:00] bad decision



in a statement quoted to Politico, one senior White House official said, " Export controls were a last resort after begging them for hours to work with us. This was not something we wanted to do, but our hands were tied."

Anthropic again disputed this version of events with one source close to the company commenting, " The White House gave ninety minutes to take the model down with no details on the actual threat. There was never any begging or asking for them to work with us, just a declared ninety-minute deadline."

Now, three White House officials commenting on the story said that Amazon wasn't the only company to raise concerns, but they didn't name the others

According to Politico sources, in fact, it seemed like Anthropic's attitude was a deciding factor One source commented, " The crux of the issue was the lack of seriousness that Anthropic was applying to it. Had Anthropic taken it seriously and rather than dismissing it as isolated move to fix or pause access, this never would have happened."

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Now, one thing going on here

is clearly challenges around technical understanding

Luda Securities, Katie Mouzouris

wrote a blog post about the specific threat

But effectively argued Anthropic's point that not only was it not a big deal, but that it can't be addressed without making the model worse at fixing bugs and verifying patches

Software engineer Cory Ward wrote, " Can we stop calling an LLM finding bugs in a code base it has access to a jailbreak? That's not what this is. The guardrails are not intended to prevent finding or fixing bugs. They're intended to prevent the model from being used to identify and leverage new exploits

There is no safety issue demonstrated by this example. There is no evidence this is a violation of the guardrails. There is nothing to suggest this is a wholesale jailbreak of the safety measures. There is thus nothing for Anthropic to actually resolve with the behavior of the model. It is entirely down to politics

AI policy researcher Miles Brundage wrote, " Sounds like some folks at the White House were unaware that Fable has greater than zero cyber abilities, so thought something unsurprising was surprising."

Dario rightly [00:16:00] thought this was a misunderstanding. No one in government who knew what was going on was looped in or could stop it, and people outside egged it on

Part of the issue, asColin Kremerer puts it, " Lots of knowledgeable White House tech people left

Pointing out who Dario participated in calls with on the White House side, Colin argues the White House are way out of their depth

Miles Brundage again later writes, "There's been zero indicating that domain experts

at CAISI or NSA were involved. all reporting points to senior White House officials

And in that context

What Anthropic thought was calm, rational explanation clearly came off as not taking the issue seriously

Remember, one of Politico's White House sources said the crux of the issue was the lack of seriousness that Anthropic was applying to it

Now, we are clearly getting two very different versions of events from Friday. One from the White House and one from Anthropic. One detail that seems to be most at odds is whether Dario was actually at a wellness retreat

Tech reporter Ashley Vance gave his account writing, " None of this was some weeks long back and forth. I was at Anthropic's H- HQ on Friday reporting when all [00:17:00] thisunfolded. Dario is not at a wellness retreat. The feds seem to be scrambling to try and make an example of Anthropic again.

This is not technical, it's petty."

Later, Ashley continued, "The feds don't like Dario Amodei because he won't do all their bidding. And so now we've entered the Soviet-style propaganda portion of the program, with the White House feeding every reporter it can find with laughable claims like Dario is unreachable at a wellness retreat.

Come on. I'd hoped the US would not be self-defeating on AI, since it's 

kind of 

one of the last hopes the US has versus China. But here we are already

about,

speaking about the wellness retreat point, Jeff Cafe writes, " This seemingly minor detail included by the White House is what Scott Adams would have called a linguistic kill shot, a simple, sticky idea that immediately generates a visual in anyone hearing the phrase. Nobody can think about this story without picturing Dario like this."

the meme that he's pointing to is Dario in a bathrobe with two cucumbers on his eyes 

as someone leans over and gives him the news

Now from there, it just got weirder. On Saturday afternoon, we got an entirely alternate explanation that it was in fact [00:18:00] China all along Washington Insider publication Semafor wrote, " The White House imposed export controls on Anthropic's powerful Mythosmodel partly over suspicions that a China-linked group had accessed it, a person familiar with the matter said."

Now beyond that, the article 

contained almost zero new details continuing, " It's unclear how the White House learned of the issue, which organization accessed the model, and how it gained access to Mythos. But if the Chinese government had access to Mythos, it could pose national security risks to the US.

China could also attempt to reverse engineer and copy the model in a process known as distillation." An Anthropic spokesperson commented that the White House didn't raise any concerns about China during the discussions, and also noted that Anthropic models are already blocked in China

Ashley Vance again. " Quick, someone say it was China, but it's really well-sourced, right?"

Well, there was a person familiar

Adding more fuel to the fire that thiswas actually personal and about the White House's antipathy towards Pete Hegseth 

despite David Sachs saying that it wasn't

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tweeted, " Three months ago, Department of War kicked [00:19:00] Anthropic out of our building forever. every passing day proves why that was the right move."

And at this point, I would argue

that even if we find it abhorrent and distasteful, that policy this consequential is being made on the basis of whether people with different political opinions like each other or not

the reality is that in this moment, the world that we actually live in right now we don't have the privilege of just sitting back and finding that abhorrent. And nor importantly, do anthropic Axios published a follow-up article this morning called quoting an administration official saying they screwed us.

The article was titled Personality Clashes Sent Anthropic's Models Offline



Axios quotes a source familiar with the administration's thinking saying, " Anthropic has not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration and appreciate the ideological differences. It's likely they just speak in different languages."

another source from around the administration argued that the admin viewed Anthropic's position at the outset as, "No, we're not going to do anything about it. This is not a real issue

For some, the real politic is very obvious here. Puco Capital Bloke wrote, " Much of the tech community is exposing [00:20:00] themselves for not understanding the absolute basics of political theory. The US government has a monopoly on the use of force. A private citizen cannot speak the way Dario speaks. He will have to change his messaging or be destroyed

Stratechery's Ben Thompson wrote a long post this morning called "Anthropic's Safety Superpower"

In it, he made what I believe is a salient point about this

He basically said that all of the things that people have been critical about Fable 4 over the last week or so, for Anthropic simply come down to safety the change in the data retention policy

The guardrails, everything was about safety Thompson writes, " Here's the thing about these safety justifications. I think they work because to Anthropic, they aren't justifications. The company really believes that they are the only ones who believe in superintelligence, and thus are the only ones who are sufficiently concerned about the dangers.

That excuses decision after decision, policy after policy, and confrontation after confrontation that to people on the outside looks like a bizarre combination of cynicism and [00:21:00] naivete

Ben concludes, "I respect this alignment and I fear it. I respect it because it is so clearly effective. The closest analogy is probably Apple, which has framed every self-serving action in the guise of doing right by users, and often they were. So it is with Anthropic. What I fear, however, is that it is one thing to have people convinced they know best building a smartphone that I can take or leave.

It's considerably more concerning to have them building superintelligence that has the potential to rival or exceed the power of nation-states or merely massive corporations. The history of brilliant people convinced they know what humanity needs is a sordid one, precisely because they have convinced themselves that their intentions are good, justifying actions that very much are not."

I I personally have seen this sort of thing up close and personal before and to the extent that Ben is right

I believe that any time people start convincing themselves that they are the only ones who are sufficiently concerned about something and the only ones who know the right remedy, things tend to get very bad very quickly and as Thompson points out, the implications of all that are radically amplified because of the [00:22:00] power inherent in the situation

RSI senior fellow Adam Terrier argues That when push comes to shove, as interesting as it might be to debate

Whatever got us here, the policy is disastrous Adam writes, " Because this is happening to Anthropic, the temptation for many will be to say, ' Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.' They have relentlessly raised the regulatory temperature in Washington by inviting far-reaching controls of

frontier models.

They made this bet, and now they have to lay in it. But this decision by the Trump administration should not be judged on a desire for payback politics, but on the merits, and specifically what it means for America's broader AI objectives. In that regard, this action is truly outrageous. How exactly is the government planning on even going about verifying everyone who uses this specific model to ensure compliance?

That alone raises huge flags. Between the latest executive order shifting more control to NSA and this recent chatter about quasi-nationalization and equity stakes, and now this action, we are talking about a significant escalation in the

AI and centralization of control over advanced computation in [00:23:00] this country.



And this is all being done by an administration that had previously made acceleration in winning the great AI race a priority. We're moving backwards now."

In a companion blog post, Adam wrote, " A leading US AI company was forced to take down a product that millions were using based on non-public, unexplained concerns of a few government officials. This isn't the red tape risk of the FDA. It's more like the FDA demanding, out of the blue and without explanation, that everyone stop drinking milk if milk was 50% of last year's stock market gains."



now now at the time of recording, which is right around 9:00 AM Eastern Time on Monday Everything is still in the air

last night The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic had dispatched a slew of senior staff to DC trying to resolve the issue

Most of the article was just a rehashing of of everything we already know but we got a handful of names of 

who Anthropic sent to DC. Writes the journal, "Anthropic sent senior technical staff to Washington, including top security researchers Nicholas Carlini, Logan Graham, who leads the team that evaluates models for risks, and David Orr, the company's head of safeguards.

They will meet with [00:24:00] security experts from the government in hopes of de-escalating the conflict," said people familiar with the meetings

Now it's been so little time that we're only just starting to see a public response



On Sunday, a group of cybersecurity leaders

by former Face- l- led by former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos, published an open letter pushing on the administration " Dear Secretary Lutnick and National Cyber Director Karen Cross," they wrote, " We, the undersigned executives and technical leaders from across the United States, write to you to ask you to lift the export control directives on Anthropic's Fable and Mythos LLMs, and commit to an open, scientific, and transparent process of handling AI risk assessments in the future."

their argument is basically that other models are good at this stuff as well, that the multiple protections that they've built in are pretty good That it's essential that researchers have access to those tools 

so they can harden their own defenses with them, and that Chinese open weight models are only months behind

Now this particular letter isn't necessarily getting a ton of reach but I will be watching to see whether there are other sorts of responses that come up around this as well

Ultimately 

from as far as I can tell from outside

the resolution to this is, like it or not, the resolution to this [00:25:00] is not going to primarily be technical. It's going to be interpersonal

Anthropic has up until now clearly thought that they could simply reason with the White House

and make them see things as Anthropic does

is,

that is clearly not the case

And whether they wanted to be in this position or not

Anthropic can no longer play the scrappy startup They are one of two leaders in the most consequential industry certainly for the economy

if not the larger world as well

And they've gotta play ball with the government they have, not just the government they'd like

Anthr- responding to news about Anthropic's senior technical staff going to Washington, investor Melinda Chu wrote, 

if Dario Amadei's not on the plane, nothing will change

Now, it is highly likely by the time you are watching this , it'll be out of date

But of course, we'll be back with another update very soon. For now, that's gonna do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always, and until next time, peace 

​ 

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