Quote · This Week in Tech (Audio)
TWiT 1089: Robot Butt Crack - Anthropic Banned, But Winning
Where this was said
The Anthropic Fable Ban: What Really Happened
At 18:10 · chapter starts 10:20
The show's main story kicks off with Leo detailing how Anthropic's Fable model — essentially its powerful Mythos model with safety classifiers — was banned by the US Commerce Department after an Amazon research team demonstrated it could not only find software vulnerabilities but write test exploits to verify patches. Security researcher Katie Mazuris reviewed the Amazon paper, but her close association with Chris Krebs — the CISA director Trump fired for certifying the 2020 election — may have been the real political trigger, according to TechDirt's Mike Masnick. Iain Thomson notes that security expert Alex Stamos launched freefable.org with prominent signatories arguing every major AI can do what Fable does. The ban, Leo argues, is legally questionable, practically unenforceable, and mirrors the failed 1990s encryption export ban.
The official reason for banning Fable was AI-assisted vulnerability discovery. The real reason, according to TechDirt's Mike Masnick, may be that the security researcher who reviewed the research was associated with Chris Krebs — the CISA director Trump fired for saying the 2020 election was fair.
OpenAI donated to Trump's PAC, pledged 10% of its IPO to the US government, and put Sam Altman on stage at the inaugural to announce Stargate. Anthropic did none of that and got banned. OpenAI's chief global affairs officer is Chris Lehane — the political mastermind behind Airbnb's regulatory battles. Anthropic needs to play the same game.
