This whole Fable export control situation is actually net positive to regulation discourse. It’s an early peek into what AI regulation would end up looking like at scale when enacted at the model layer instead of the specific application of the AI.
The government would have sole discretion over when a model can be released to the to public, based on a bunch of factors that they inherently control.
In this case, based on the available reporting, the risk is that the model can be jailbroken to deliver increased cyber exploit capabilities. The issue is that actually you want models to be able to have those capabilities on the defense side of cyber as well, and for all intents and purposes, by Anthropic’s own response, you can execute these capabilities today in other models.
So thus the whole challenge will be that you’re debating with the government, over months and months, with every model release, what these models are actually capable of and what their risks are. Inherently, there’s not only a lot of subjectivity in determining those risks, but there’s also many other factors that go into the risks being practical in the first place.
The net result is that we would end up with backlog of AI releases, progress in the market inherently would dramatically slow down, and AI would start to look more like any other sclerotic industry. If this paradigm had existed 3 years ago at the start of the current AI wave, we’d likely currently be stuck on GPT-4 level intelligence at this point.
This is why, wherever possible, we should be regulating the applied use of AI. We should continue to study and enforce the dangerous use of AI in cyber attacks, financial services risks, fraud, biowarfare, and other spaces. AI safety is incredibly important, but slowing down progress this early in the development of AI I suspect is net harmful.
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 Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
