For years now, Amazon has been in Anthropic’s corner in the artificial intelligence war, putting $4 billion into the AI startup in 2023. Since then, it’s poured in more and more cash at every turn, including another $25 billion just this past April to Anthropic’s growing infrastructure needs. So you’d imagine, then, that Amazon would be thrilled that Anthropic is on its way to becoming a publicly traded company with a highly touted model that has lapped some rivals in benchmarking scores.
It turns out, maybe not. Earlier this month, Anthropic’s Fable 5 AI model—the supposedly safe version of its “too powerful to release” Mythos model—was essentially banned by the Trump administration after the government was alerted that the chatbot could be jailbroken and potentially used in cyberattacks. The party responsible for getting the Trump gang up in arms and ultimately getting Fable 5 locked down for anyone outside of the United States was… Amazon, allegedly. According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy took concerns raised by his security researchers to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other government officials, who hit the emergency shut-off button. Anthropic, for what it’s worth, claimed that the technique Amazon was so worried about could only identify “a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities” that other frontier models could also find. It’s also worth noting that it’s possible to jailbreak basically any LLM, though the workarounds tend to be very specific and have limited utility.
