Anthropic has announced that its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models will once again be available to the public after reaching an agreement with the Commerce Department to deploy the AI models with new guardrails and classifiers.
Background on the Export Controls
The export controls were put in place after the Trump administration became alarmed by a threat intelligence report from Amazon claiming to have jailbroken Fable's cybersecurity capabilities. The administration levied the export controls due to concerns that the release of Fable 5 would lead to the model being jailbroken, giving users access to cybersecurity and other capabilities that Anthropic has said could wreak havoc on the open internet if placed in the wrong hands.
Concerns Over Jailbreaks
However, Anthropic confirmed that further testing found that equivalent and lesser models could identify the same vulnerabilities as Fable did in the Amazon report. The company also stated that they have yet to see a jailbreak that affects the model's restrictions on cybersecurity and biology work, though they did call this instance 'a borderline case.'
Some cybersecurity professionals have publicly complained that existing safety guardrails on Fable 5 blocked many routine defensive cybersecurity work in addition to malicious use cases. Anthropic said it has trained new safety classifiers to target and block the behaviors described in the Amazon report and notify users when it happens.
New Safeguards and Classifiers
The new classifiers will block the techniques '99.9%' of the time, but Anthropic said they're not expected to block all lower risk routine cyberdefense capabilities, just the most harmful ones. The restrictions will likely make it even harder to use Fable 5 for defensive cybersecurity.
One effect the company expects is that more 'benign' requests for routine coding and debugging tasks will be flagged by the system. Christopher Padilla, former Assistant Secretary for Commerce for export administration, said that while it's 'good news' the controls have ultimately been lifted, the Trump administration's AI policy stumbles over the past two years illustrate 'the risks of ad hoc, transactional policymaking.'
Criticism of the Trump Administration's AI Policy
Padilla called the Trump administration's approach chaotic and unpredictable — the opposite of the clear, consistent rules industry depends on. The administration has quietly partnered with OpenAI and Anthropic on voluntary national security testing, especially as frontier models began showing advanced automation and cyberattack capabilities.
The national security arrangement was supposedly codified in a White House executive order last month, shaped heavily by industry boosters who feared regulatory delays would slow U.S. development. But days after Fable's release, Commerce imposed new export controls on Anthropic's models anyway.
Padilla called proposed AI safety regulations by the Biden administration 'flawed and overly complex' but nevertheless predictable compared to the status quo. Instead of replacing those proposed regulations with their own vision, the Trump White House has been 'to put it mildly, all over the place on AI policy.'
The same BIS that stopped Fable and Mythos has a permissive policy for exporting high-end AI semiconductors to China — in exchange for a cut of the take. This is not a smart way to make policy. Bad for industry competitiveness and for national security.
Anthropic's agreement with the Commerce Department marks a significant development in the ongoing debate over AI regulation and export controls. As the US continues to navigate the complex landscape of AI development and deployment, the need for clear and consistent rules will only continue to grow.
Source: CyberScoop