Anthropic’s Fable model is back. But U.S. AI policy is still a mess

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. It’s Jeremy here, filling in for Bea, who usually writes the Thursday newsletter. In this edition:

Anthropic’s Fable is back. But U.S. AI policy is still a mess.

OpenAI wants the U.S. government to take a 5% stake in the company

And OpenAI reportedly scores a breakthrough in compute efficiency

Plus Meta stock soars on plans to launch a cloud computing business

The biggest AI news of the past week has been the government’s decision to roll back the export controls it had imposed two weeks ago on Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models. Those controls had resulted in Anthropic having to disable both models for all users. The government first reversed course on Mythos on Friday evening and then on Fable late on Tuesday. You can read more about the Fable decision here from Fortune’s Tristan Bove.The decision will be a relief for Anthropic and its investors, and for many people who were hoping to use Fable, which can carry out lengthy tasks autonomously. (Whether Anthropic investors should really be happy is another matter; there’s an argument to be made that Anthropic might have avoided this two week crisis with a different political comms strategy, an idea that I explore in this Fortune story.) It will also cheer cyber defenders who have been eager to use Mythos to find security flaws and patch them before attackers have access to models of equal capability.But the latest decision to lift the export controls still leaves American AI policy in something of a mess. The U.S. is continuing to operate what is essentially a licensing regime for frontier AI models, while officially denying that this is the case. This licensing regime is also almost completely ad hoc, with opaque rules apparently being invented on the fly by various U.S. government officials.Now, there are reports that this may be about to change. According to a story in the Financial Times, the U.S. is working with leading AI labs on an explicit set of “voluntary standards” that frontier AI labs can meet—at least when it comes to cybersecurity—to have a reasonable expectation that the U.S. government won’t object to a model’s public release. In addition, Anthropic announced that it is working with the U.S. government on a shared framework for assessing the level of risk that a jailbreak to a model’s guardrails poses. Anthropic said it was working with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and what it described as “other Glasswing partners” initially on this framework but welcomed the participation of others. (Glasswing is the name Anthropic has given to the coalition of critical infrastructure companies that have been allowed access to Mythos.) It was interesting—and perhaps shows the level of distrust between Anthropic and OpenAI—that they did not include their rival in that group from the get-go.

Still, damage from the export control decision has already been done and cannot be undone. The decision to impose the export controls, even temporarily, has forced potential customers of American frontier AI models to recognize that it might be strategically unwise to count on these models for anything essential. At the very least, fall-back options are needed. This view is especially prevalent in Europe, as Bea has reported. But even in the U.S., a lot more enterprises are now talking about open........

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