A look at the chaos at Anthropic after it disabled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 with less than 90 minutes of notice, as some staff wonder if Trump is bullying Anthropic
and that's exactly what I did...My position remains consistent: We are on a shot clock until Mythos-level capabilities diffuse widely, including to non-U.S. / Chinese models. We need defenders to find and patch vulnerabilities before that happens. This requires cooperation between government and industry...Michael Morale /@wirenut3388:@DavidSacks There it is. Bend the knee or else. If you really give a shit, you would be lobbying the admin to hand this over to experts not politically influence
New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
The immediate shutdown followed growing concern over the deployment of Anthropic’s highest-capability systems, while internal accounts framed the decision as disruptive and politically charged. The record does not establish why the government pressure alleged by some employees occurred.
Follow-on coverage shows access being handled as a security and infrastructure question: Mythos 5 was later cleared for critical-infrastructure operators, while Anthropic worked to restore broader Fable 5 access and committed to detecting and addressing security risks.
First-order effects
Users of Fable 5 and Mythos 5 faced an abrupt loss of access, forcing Anthropic to manage operational disruption and customer communications on a compressed timetable.
Anthropic’s model-release decisions became directly entangled with U.S. government security expectations, while staff scrutiny focused on whether political pressure influenced the shutdown.
Second-order effects
Enterprise customers, especially operators tied to critical infrastructure, must treat access to frontier AI services as conditional rather than continuously available; redeployment can become segmented by use case and security posture.
Rivals and AI buyers face added pressure to demonstrate safeguards and to reduce dependence on a single U.S. provider, a concern already raised by European political figures in related coverage.
Third-order effects
If security-related intervention becomes a recurring condition of deployment, frontier-model access may evolve into a tiered market: restricted systems for approved critical uses, with broader availability contingent on demonstrated safeguards.
The episode strengthens the case for AI governance that operates through deployment controls and provider commitments—not only through general-purpose safety rules—though the durability of that approach depends on how consistently governments and vendors apply it.
The trend: Frontier AI deployment is shifting from a product-availability decision into a negotiated security and sovereignty issue involving providers, governments, and critical-infrastructure customers.
Some recent articles have created a misleading narrative that I did not take Mythos seriously or tried to downplay the cyber threat. This is based on egregious cherry-picking of my comments...It is entirely possible to question a messenger's track record while still treating the…
@DavidSacks There it is. Bend the knee or else. If you really give a shit, you would be lobbying the admin to hand this over to experts not politically influenced. [image]
REUTERS - “Sources” have revealed that the USG's decision to ban Mythos-class models was driven in part by their ominous name. “We were in the Situation Room watching ‘Resident Evil: Apocalypse’ with the megacorp doing ‘Project Nemesis’,” said our source. “At one point Marco
Hey @DavidSacks, I'm on stage tomorrow afternoon at the @BigTechnology AI Summit. I'm sure @Kantrowitz would be happy to let us have a debate about the real risks of Fable and the Admin's actions. 3:25pm, Commonwealth Club. See you there?
@DavidSacks So what is your position? Should Fable remain banned for an unwritten standard that no other model is held to and for capabilities that are available from Chinese open-weight models? Should the USG kneecap a US champion the week GLM 5.2 pulls even with Opus?
David Sacks says: “We are on a shot clock until Mythos-level capabilities diffuse widely.” It's true. It's fascinating to imagine what the internal, un-guardrailed version of Mythos that Anthropic has, must be capable of. In some amount of time, we don't know exactly how much,…
David Sacks acknowledges that eventually open source models with Mythos-level capabilities will become diffuse in our society. Although he cites Anthropic as “needlessly confrontational” toward the administration, he says that “he hopes everyone moves forward.” I think the [image…
i'm generally “on anthropic's side” in this and past conflicts with the USG, and in some sense glad dario has taken stands against them. but it seems they've all been ~due to poor relationships and communication w admin, which seems like... literally a CEO's job? it feels
the nytimes really didn't hold back on getting internal chat messages from anthropic where the “same people” who previously claimed the ability to bring about a cybersecurity “reckoning” are now left wondering if they're being “picked on, bullied, unfairly targeted” by the [image…
Sacks is either a totally unserious idiot or a lying partisan hack. Here is Sacks talking about how evil Anthropic is for wanting to limit open source models due to their limited guardrails on the All In Podcast from May 29th 2026. Now he's supporting the Trump admin banning [ima…
everyone at anthropic passed the culture fit interview of being ok if their stock went to 0 so clearly the leaks are sanctioned and they're just trying to appear relatable to win some public sympathy points [image]
All the major news outlets agree: The biggest winner in the Anthropic controversy is open source. And I wholeheartedly agree. I said it a few days ago, and I'll say it again: it's the biggest PR win for open source ever. Whether it's Bloomberg, Fortune, or CNBC: the consensus …
This report seems to back up my Occam's razor read of it all from a couple days ago. Basically, the two sides distrust each other, Anthropic's handling isn't doing themselves any favors, and neither is Amazon, who sort of stumbled into triggering this blow up... spyglass.org/ant…