Late on Friday, Anthropic issued a surprise announcement: It was disabling its new Fable 5 model, released just days earlier, after a directive from the U.S. government that cited national security concerns. The model is a safeguarded version of Anthropic’s Mythos family of models that were deemed so powerful when first unveiled in April that it caused widespread alarm over cybersecurity threats.

In a June 12 blog post, Anthropic said it believes the government became aware of a “jailbreaking” method to bypass Fable 5’s safeguards. While the company is complying with the directive, it pushed back against it. “We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people,” the blog post says. “If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”

Just hours before the directive — Anthropic said it received the government’s letter at 5:21 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday — Chief Commercial Officer Paul Smith discussed the “tradeoffs” when it comes to releasing such a powerful tool in an interview with Forbes.

“You have to make a judgment call on these things,” he said. “The safest you can be is to not let people use something. And then it’s totally safe. But then how is that helping the mission, and how is that helping people actually derive real value from Mythos-level intelligence?”

Of course, he........

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