Decision on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models means the U.S. has a licensing regime for frontier AI—it just doesn’t want to admit it

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…Anthropic scrambles to try to reverse U.S. export controls on its Fable and Mythos models…the U.S. government decision on Anthropic’s models causes panic in Europe over AI sovereignty and delight among China’s open source AI developers…OpenAI’s finances revealed…a new benchmark shows AI agents may not be as capable as you think…and courts are turning to AI for transcripts but the reasons may not be what you think.

This week’s biggest news is obviously the U.S. government’s decision to impose export controls on Anthropic’s newest and most powerful AI models, Fable and Mythos, after researchers at Amazon found a way to jailbreak some of Fable’s cybersecurity guardrails. The decision forced Anthropic to disable the two AI models for all users, since American “deemed export” rules mean that allowing any foreign national, including those who work for Anthropic, to access the models would violate the law. Anthropic has been scrambling to try to get the export controls rescinded, sending a delegation of high level executives to Washington earlier this week to try to hash out a compromise with the government. But so far, no deal has been reached.The government decision has wide ranging implications and sparked all kinds of reactions. Those who think Anthropic uses “fear-based marketing”—hyping the dangerous potential of its models as a kind of psychologically-crafty way of touting its models as the most capable on the market—reacted with schadenfreude, declaring that Anthropic was only reaping what it sowed. (AI “godfather” Yann LeCun, who has been dismissive of AI’s existential risks, was among those endorsing this view.) Others, who think Anthropic is sincere in its communication about its models’ dangers, were more divided on the decision. Some were willing to give the government some benefit of the doubt and think Anthropic may have been reckless in releasing Fable, which was supposed to offer many of the benefits of Mythos without the cyber security and bio weapons risks, but which may not, in fact, have had robust enough guardrails.Many cyber security experts, however, say the Fable jailbreak Amazon discovered did not unlock potential offensive cyber abilities that are not also currently available from other AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, which are not being subjected to export controls. More than 100 cyber and tech policy experts signed an open letter stating that Fable and Mythos, were essential tools for cyber defenders to find and patch vulnerabilities in their own systems and that these benefits outstripped the risk attackers might jailbreak Fable. 

Clearly Amazon must have thought the jailbreak was a serious concern—its CEO Andy Jassy personally made a call to the White House about the issue. But there is still much we don’t know about exactly what the internal debate was within Amazon. The e-commerce and cloud giant has invested $13 billion into Anthropic, and committed to investing up to $20 billion more in the coming years, and it remains unclear exactly how Amazon weighed the risks to its investment in the AI startup against the national security concerns it raised with the U.S. government, and how exactly Jassy characterized the risks from Anthropic’s models compared to others on the market. While some conspiracy-minded analysts have suggested Amazon may have had commercial reasons to torpedo Anthropic’s models, those theories make little sense to me, and I think we still need to hear from Amazon more about exactly why it took the steps it did and exactly what Jassy said in his calls with the administration. 

A licensing regime by another name

What is clear, however, is that the U.S. government now has a mandatory licensing regime for frontier AI. It is just not a transparent, de jure one. Instead, it is ad hoc and opaque. Jonathan Iwry, a fellow at the Wharton Accountable AI Lab, told my colleague Beatrice Nolan, “we see the government repurposing existing legal authorities into what is effectively a backdoor licensing regime.” Dean Ball, the libertarian AI policy thinker who briefly helped the Trump administration shape its AI policy last year but who has now emerged as a fierce critic of the government’s recent AI decisions, put it this way: 

AI is licensed now, but the requirements change constantly and are........

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