Cybersecurity Experts Ask Feds to Lift Restrictions on Mythos

More than 120 cybersecurity and other tech professionals have signed an open letter asking the federal government to lift the export control directives on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos large language models and commit to a new process for assessing artificial intelligence (AI) risk.

The open letter is dated Sunday (June 14) and addressed to Commerce Secretary Howard W. Lutnick and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross.

The letter followed Anthropic’s Friday (June 13) announcement that it disabled some access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models in response to a U.S. government export control directive, which called on the company to suspend access to those models by “any foreign national,” whether within or outside the United States, Anthropic employees included.

The company had launched the model four days earlier, on Tuesday (June 9), saying that it had developed safeguards to prevent them from being misused for purposes related to cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation.

Joe Levy, CEO of cybersecurity firm Sophos, shared a link to the open letter in a Monday (June 15) post on LinkedIn, saying that he and many colleagues from across the security community had signed it.

The open letter said that the signers believe AI is having significant impacts on cybersecurity, that Anthropic’s Mythos models are good at finding flaws but are not uniquely good at it, and that Anthropic has built protections into the Fable model to prevent its use for cyber offensive purposes.

The signers also believe that it is essential to provide AI to coders and security teams, that Chinese open-weight models are only months behind the best American models, and that it is dangerous to keep the best capabilities from defenders when adversaries are making rapid advances, according to the letter.

In the case of the action taken on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models, the letter said that the signers believe that the models’ capability that triggered the action should not be considered an offensive capability, that Fable’s capability to find bugs and generate working exploits can be replicated by other models, and that Anthropic is addressing research to enable continuous improvement.

“As a result, 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 open letter said.

The letter also said that while not all signers agree that AI regulation is the way to go, any regulation that does get implemented should include input from industry and academia, include a democratic rule-making process, be enforced transparently and fairly, and be used only to the extent necessary to protect the American public.

With these suggestions, the federal government and industry can partner to help “maintain America’s lead in technology while protecting critical software and systems,” the letter said.

It was reported Monday that Anthropic is working with the White House to end restrictions on the two models.