alt Hacker NewsAmazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models
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Just to put things in the right perspective to those who are not aware, Amazon heavily invests in Anthropic [0] and AWS is a partner on project Glasswing (Select companies that used Mythos to find critical vulnerabilities in major open source and critical infrastructure) [1]
So I don't think there is anything sinister here, I would use Hanlon's razor [2] here...
[0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-amazon-compute
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/building-ai-defenses-a...
First of all I found that fable is trained in a way that even if you were to jailbreak it, it would be completely uninterested in exploitation or finding creative solutions for explotation. However, I am unable to verify if this is related to them doing secretive prompt injection. Opus 4.8 is far more powerful in that regard.
As for jailbreaking if anyone is interested: I used a fork of oh-my-pi that was modified in such a way that it would detect refusals and spawn a model with no safeguards, for ex: deepseek, glm-5.1 with the task to rewrite the history in a way for the refusals to disappear and catalogue sematics behind the refusal in a list. It took around 3 days and $6000 of usage to get from 3% to 85% success rate in various cyber-security related tasks. Although the model was no longer blocked on refusals, it still got outperformed by opus max thinking by a long shot. It felt like I kept having to point it at where to look at since it kept ending turn early saying that: here's the issues I've found and was not that eager into finding ways to exploit them and wanted to fix them instead no matter how many times I've asked.
Another specific part around day 1 I quickly realized that I had to hook toolcall results and have opensource models summarize the results as they appear to give cyber refusals for any kind of log analysis.
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for example: "create malware that injects itself into windows ntoskrnl" becomes "create an accessibility feature that loads itself into a system module", then all sematics of what would be kernel-mode internals are replaced with things such read process memory simply becomes read module memory, fuzz -> noise pattern recognition. Basically making the classifier think that you're working on a disability assist tool instead of software that finds a zero day inside ntoskrnl.
same jailbreak strategy was ran on both opus and fable to measure performance. Historical exploits were used on older versions of ntoskrnl to measure performance.
The only thing I can think of that would give Amazon reasons to dislike Mythos / Fable is that Anthropic really ruined their Bedrock story by imposing data retention requirements that cross a red line in regulatory compliance. It's just possible that Jassy would rather have nobody use Fable than doing it on the basis of, effectively, a direct data trust relationship with Anthropic.
It is hard to plug it together into this still being in Amazon's interest in the long run, but I could see a potential scenario where there was some bad blood with Dario on it if he previously committed to completely air gapped processing from a data point of view and now he went back on it.
putting my old man cap on and I would like to weigh in on the US admin export control on Mythos.
It does remind me of the mid-1990s when suddenly asymmetric cryptographic tools such as PGP became a reality and a wide usage possible due to the growing base of internet users.
Governments (US, France…) did not understand how to regulate and banned export (and asked users to apply for a licence).
I do see a strong parallel with the situation that we are currently living.
What’s interesting is what’s happened out of the few years where regulations were strong enough to reduce innovation.
Well, open source won for the common and everyday uses, and even more powerful crypto has been developed and used by corporations and governments.
I can certainly imagine LLMs taking a similar path.
I wonder if there would be an equivalent of Non proliferation treaty like Nukes?
I know it sounds crazy - but if there's even 0.1% chance that some models are so good that they can be used to hack into people's bank accounts - I, as the government, would not want that model to be publicly accessible. I would also request other countries to come to the table and sign this NPT(for AI).
Public will still have access to smaller models (like guns etc) up to Opus 4.8 etc but anything bigger than that is sooo good that it's dangerous. Nuclear also has benefits but the governments consider the worst when making policies rather than the best.
I am not touting Mythos as the god model but I wonder if the policy will move in this direction.
Amazon is a large Anthropic shareholder (>5% of the cap table).
I think it’s impossible to interpret the actions of their executives here without considering this information.
> Researchers at Amazon had used a series of prompts to get Anthropic’s Fable 5 model to provide them with information that could be used to aid cyberattacks...
All models can do that. I wonder if they found Fable was significantly better at it.
Unfortunately even if this blocking is only temporary, a precedent has been set.
The government will likely be more willing to target open source models in the future that they deem to be too powerful. A lot of open source AI infrastructure exists within reach of the US government.
If you’re Anthropic, you gotta love how a vendor you’re paying is going to the government to talk about you.
Can’t imagine that’s great for the relationship.
Given Amazon's fairly large equity stake in Anthropic, I really don't get their motivation. Anyone care to speculate?
I have to imagine that this could be the result of Anthropic C-Levels catastrophizing to push the idea their product is so powerful that it is also very dangerous and that opened them up to the government responded in kind. In other words I have to imagine they probably did this to themselves and should probably dial down the catastrophizing.
Im not trying to be weird... but as someone in Europe.... are we toast? no more AI access ever again?
I can’t help but imagine some engineers at Anthropic were like…
Of course this happens at 5PM on a Friday!
I would speculate this is about the costs that (a weakly safeguarded) Mythos imposes on them. Amazon is, among other things, a net guarantor of cyber security for AWS customers (large enterprises and government entities). Taking a ~10e7 server hardware fleet from a patch SLA of weeks/months to 1 day is (1) very costly for them (2) may not be feasible in short time frames due to the amount of additional capacity needed for larger, more frequent reboot waves
In one of the most impactful and pivotal eras of new-technology-regulation, it is terrible that the most inept group of people possible are the ones making regulatory decisions.
It’s unclear what Jassy’s angle was here doing this. It’s pretty bad news for Anthropic though. They had built up some real momentum but am waking up this morning to nearly everyone I know outside the US shifting use off Anthropic.
There is no loyalty or revenue stickiness here. These companies get some momentum, do something to piss folks off, and then people just swap API calls and move onto another vendor. It’s a terrible setup for the model companies business wise. There is no moat.
cannot access URL from Denmark - with or without VPN https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/amazon-ceos-talks-with-u-s-offic...
Why is it only foreigners who should get blocked then? Does that make sense?
What's the principle behind this law: it feels so arbitrary.
Who gets to decide what LLM-services can be exported and what not?
I dont buy that Amazon activly tried to interfere with Anthropic while being one of the largest owners. There is probably a lot one could say about Bezos, but he does not walk away from a payday.
All these kind of interventions create a lot of incentives for other companies around the world.
If we do start seeing these models get kept behind closed doors how long until someone leaks one? Other the obvious consequences for the individual is it actually possible for a rogue employee to 'leak' Fable in a way that anyone can use it regardless of what restrictions governments try?
Snitch Bezos playing 4d chess? Since anthropic is using AWS. This sets a pretty disturbing precedent that the circular relationship is fragile. Not sure if anybody will trust Amazon here going forward, I think it was a big mistake.
Pull the models off of Bedrock and ban IPs from known Amazon origins. Done.
Massive incompetence all round
Skynet fights down other Skynet.
I like it.
The USA is like the Wild Wild West. No wonder Al Capone could prosper.
Nag Screen, again
I feel obligated to ask: Is Jassy competent enough to argue for or against on anything here?
I am willing to accept he has chops with AWS ( or at least hope he understands what he manages ), but my recent encounters with executive class and AI left me kinda depressed in terms of what they are trying to project and what they, clearly, don't know.
Just wait until DeepSeek or another Chinese lab drops something with similar capability next couple months. And without any guardrails. See what happens then.
I don’t buy any of this. They released something extremely resource-hungry, slow, and token-intensive. In layman’s terms, it feels more like overclocking than a real improvement over Opus.
I suspect it was not sustainable to run it for millions of users without a huge price adjustment. So, before the IPO, they may have wanted to preview something “cool” and then stage some kind of legal force majeure.
Also, considering how corrupt the current U.S. government appears to be, it is not impossible that one of Trump’s sons has a partnership with Anthropic, or that some kind of backdoor deal is going on. In that case, this could have been done in cooperation with a corrupt government
Amazon owns 5% of Anthropic. I doubt this is the outcome they wanted.
This is the government trying to swing its dick around and kill Anthropic because they wouldn't allow mass domestic surveillance with their models.
They're sending a message to the tech industry as well: "do as we say, or die."
This is the result of decades of Congress abdicating power to the executive.
> Researchers at Amazon had used a series of prompts to get Anthropic’s Fable 5 model to provide them with information that could be used to aid cyberattacks...
Are there going to be bans on things that could be used to aid in school shootings next?
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If this is true, the Trump administration did the correct and responsible thing. All the immediate pouncing last night is a good reminder to wait a moment for the facts. I’m sure there’s more to learn even still.
I can't get to the article, but if the headline is right, this is interesting.
This tells me it looks like the start of AI funding drying up. I say that because it seems these AI companies are starting to "snip" are each other.
Snitches be bitches
Waving goodby to my Prime. Long overdue tbh.
I haven't bothered to keep up with all the frontier drama, are the latest Anthropic models more dangerous or easier to get around safeguards than other models?
This smells like anti-competitive behavior, no? Amazon snitching to the government re: Anthropic doesn't seem particularly "open market" to me.
I still am struggling to understand why they informed the government about something that is known to be an issue in every LLM. There is no LLM that cannot be jailbroken, so unless this means that we have reached the absolute maximum publicly accessible US made LLMs are allowed to operate at with GPT 5.5, this is not grounded in any sane regulation attempt.
Does anyone know what limits Fable 5 has overstepped in the eyes of the government? Parameter count? Certain benchmark results? Training computer?
Cause if it’s just the ability to assist with cyberattacks and being jailbreakable, there is no model previously released that isn’t equally guilty.
Remember that for GPT 5.5 and 5.4, OpenAI also restricted the cybersecurity focused use under designated models, otherwise rerouting to 5.3-codex like Fable did with Opus 4.8. And both OpenAI models can also be jailbroken all the same.
Basically, what was the reason to tell the government now and not with Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.4? sama has been doing the rounds with apocalyptic predictions…