Category: Misc

In a previous edition of this newsletter, I wrote about the launch of Anthropic’s newest AI model, code-named Mythos, and how the company said that it was too powerful to be trusted — mostly because of its ability to detect and potentially exploit software vulnerabilities — and therefore would only be available to a select few companies for testing as part of something called Project Glasswing. At the time, I and others drew an analogy between Anthropic’s repeated claims about the dangers posed by its AI models and the classic fable about “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” (coincidentally, the latest update to Mythos is code-named Fable), because its claims are seen by some as primarily marketing. Well, regardless of the truth of those claims, based on recent events it appears that the townsfolk have created a Wolf Detection Department, and the full might of the Wolf Protection Force is being brought to bear on the boy and his company.

In his Understanding AI newsletter, Tim Lee put together a good overview of what happened over the past few days. Anthropic, he says, “stunned the AI world by  announcing it was revoking access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the powerful new models it released just three days earlier. The government, Anthropic said, had issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States. Because Anthropic doesn’t have a way to limit access to Americans, this amounted to a de facto ban.” According to multiple news reports, researchers working for Amazon found it was possible to bypass Fable’s guardrails and gain access to its cybersecurity capabilities. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, however, argued in a blog post that the type of bypass that occurred does not pose the same risk as a broader jailbreak, and therefore a ban is unwarranted.

Whether it is warranted or not, however, is unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) up to the government to decide, not Anthropic. The company may believe that it is the only one capable of managing or harnessing a tool like AI — and it may even be right — but that is not going to stop the government of Donald J. Trump from doing whatever the hell it wants, even if it doesn’t really know what it is doing or why. On top of that, as AI researcher and former White House advisor Dean Ball noted in a recent newsletter post entitled “Leviathan Waking,” there is a very real sense that Anthropic is either being naive or foolhardy in the way it went about releasing Mythos, since that release came so soon after the company was declared a supply-chain risk for not playing ball by allowing the Department of War to use its AI to target weapons (which I wrote about here). Ball described it in this way:

In D.C., Anthropic’s rapid release of Mythos after the supply-chain risk controversy with the Department of War was not just seen as another step in the development of AI, even if that is what it was. It was seen by many as a move against the United States Government—a private company, developing a weapon, as a move against the government. What else, really, could one have expected? The stark reality is that making superintelligence is a profoundly political act even in the healthiest of societies, to say nothing of the filthily political world we Americans currently inhabit.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.