Late last week, Anthropic took its new Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models offline following a U.S. government export-control directive that barred 'any foreign national' from using the services. The company has been in talks with the White House since Friday but has yet to secure an agreement that would allow it to reinstate the offerings. Anthropic has warned since Mythos debuted in April that the model has advanced capabilities for both finding software vulnerabilities and figuring out ways to exploit them, which could be used by bad actors. 'A great deal of advanced usage of AI models is dual use: the same queries that are beneficial in the hands of cybersecurity professionals and biology researchers could be dangerous if available to malicious actors,' the company wrote in a blog post last week.
Anthropic initially released a version called Mythos Preview to a select consortium as part of a working group known as Project Glasswing. Mythos 5 was also privately released to this group last week, while Claude Fable 5, which is a Mythos-grade model, was released to the general public with specific blocks on its ability to give responses to questions about biology and cybersecurity. The Trump administration then moved to restrict both models, believing that Fable 5’s guardrails could be disabled to allow full access to the Mythos 5 capabilities, allegedly making it a national security risk.
Experts say this institutional clash is simply delaying or masking a hard truth: Anthropic may be the tip of the spear in this moment, but AI capabilities in general and models from multiple companies and open-weight developers will almost certainly have similar capabilities to Mythos 5 in the near future—if they don’t already. 'It’s myopic in the extreme to think that no other competitors to Anthropic will develop similar capabilities to Mythos or even that they have not already done so,' says Tarah Wheeler, chief security officer of the specialized cybersecurity consulting firm TPO Group.
Source: arstechnica
