The public fight since Friday has centered on how Fable was switched off. What we should be talking about is the total lack of rules describing how such a model could be turned off in the first place, and the refusal to acknowledge that these models might actually make us all more safe, not less.
On Friday, the government ordered Anthropic to cut off both of its most capable models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, from every foreign national, including some of its own employees. Anthropic said the only way to comply in time was to disable access for all customers. The question to ask now is who gets to throw a switch like that and based on what evidence — what did Friday actually buy us?
Not safety, that’s for sure. Ten days earlier, the White House had chosen a voluntary framework for pre-release review of frontier AI models and disclaimed any mandatory licensing. I have backed every serious attempt to put AI oversight on a reviewable footing, and this was at least a step in the right direction. Then the administration reached past that executive order for export-control authority, the fastest and least answerable instrument it had, which Reuters reports was the first time Commerce used that power. Some experts doubt that AI models fit the export-control doctrine, which was built for goods that are exported rather than software that is served remotely.
