As the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Monday (June 15), the artificial intelligence (AI) startup sent top members of its tech team to Washington over the weekend in hopes of making a deal to end restrictions on two of its most powerful models.
This came after the government banned foreign governments, businesses or individuals from using Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and Fable 5 after learning that it was possible to “jailbreak” Fable 5’s protections. The company shut down access to both models, while saying it disagreed with the administration’s rationale.
“If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers,” the company added.
The WSJ, citing sources familiar with the matter, reported that officials from Anthropic and the administration held several hours of talks Saturday (June 13) on Fable 5, a pared-down version of Mythos designed for the general public.
The report also noted that a group of cybersecurity experts and executives had published an open letter Sunday (June 14) calling on the White House to undo the ban.
“This action has taken the best models away from defenders, created market uncertainty, and risked America’s AI leadership without any real risk to justify it,” the letter said.
The letter also said it is “essential to provide AI to coders and security teams so they can find and fix flaws in their own newly-written as well as decades of legacy code faster than our adversaries.”
Meanwhile, a Monday report by Bloomberg called the ban “the most significant incursion” ever undertaken by a government into an AI company’s business. It is happening as Anthropic and other AI startups are looking to go public, the report said, adding that it could set a precedent for other major AI developers, including Google, Meta and OpenAI.
Anthriopic’s troubles with the government did not begin with this ban. Earlier this year, the Defense Department declared the company a supply chain risk, meaning companies that want to work with the military would be blocked from also working with the AI startup.
This came in the wake of objections from Anthropic over the military’s use of its technology for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons systems. The company has since sued the government to get the supply chain risk designation lifted.
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