Global Consequences and Sovereign AI

In this emergency episode we are discussing the U. S. government Shutting down Anthropics fable five. AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI F friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, robots and pencils, Scrunch, Blitzy, and Out Systems To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon. com slashi daily brief or you can subscribe and I a podcast. If you want to learn more about sponsoring the show Send us a note at sponsors at Aiailybrief. ai. and while you're there, check out the new site. If there is any specific part of a specific episode that you want to share with someone, whether it's a number or some stat or quote, there's a good chance that it is now there cut up and shareable for you. so go check it out aiailybrief. ai Hello friends, Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief For the first time in the three year history of this show, news has broken on a Friday afternoon that is too significant to wait until Monday to explore Last night just before nine Eastern timee in the US. anthropic tweeted. The U. S. government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable five and Mythos five by any foreign national inside or outside the United States, including foreign national anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable five and Mythos five for all our customers to ensure compliance access to all other cloud models is not affected apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible After this absolutely stunning news, journalists and internet sleuths flew into a tizzy to try to figure out what the heck it actually just happened The Wall Street Journal added some color, reporting that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik had sent a letter to anthropic CEO Dario Amade, announcing that the new models Fable five and Mthos five were now subject to export restrictions, meaning usage by customers outside the US as well as foreign nationals within the US would be prohibited So where did this seemingly capricious policy come from It was apparently a report from another company about a jailbreak it had discovered Anthropic gave more details in their blog post writing, We received the directive from the government today at five twenty one PM. The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concerns Our understanding is that the government believes that it has become aware of a method of bypassing or jailbreaking Fable V. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known minor vulnerabilities These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly available methods are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass. And basically from there went on to say that they just don't buy the US' logic They point out that in the weeks leading up to the release of Fable, they worked with the U.S. government and many others to red Team Fable safeguards for a significant amount of time They pointed out that, quote, no testers have yet been able to find a universal jailbreak, a jailbreak method that can very broadly bypass the model safeguards Indeed, they write, we suspect that perfect jailbrake resistance is not currently possible for any model provider Every safeguard used in the industry is vulnerable to non universal jailbreaks, which can elicit some cyber information in specific circumstances, and it is likely that universal jailbreaks will eventually be found in the future They said Given that perfect jailbreak resistance does not appear to be possible today, Anthropic adopted a defense in depth strategy with Fable five. We aimed to make jailbreaks either narrow or very expensive to produce, and to combine this with thorough monitoring to quickly detect and shut down any successful attacks Harkening back to the controversy of this week, they continue This is also why Anthropic has required thirty day retention of customer data with Fable, a policy change that carries real costs for us with customers, but that allows us to research and mitigate jail brereaks. Impantly, they conclude we have not even received a disclosure of a concerning non universal potential jailbreak that led to a harmful result. P potential jail brereaks that have been disclosed to us are either entirely benign responses or are minor findings that provide no mythos specific uplift. To date, they write, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific code base and fix any software flaws Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models, including OenAI's GPT five point five, and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe. Given that then they write, we are complying with the government's legal directive and are removing access to Fable five and Mythos five for all users However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers Now the Wall Street Journal later added, the jailbreak research in question was done by researchers at Amazon who used a series of prompts to get anthropics models to provide them with information about a handful of security vulnerabilities Now one noteice people will clarify is that although the Wall Street Journal reported that the research was done by Amazon The journal did not report that it was Amazon who shared the findings with the U.S government Nickon X writes, Project Glasswing's whole purpose is to literally do security tests to find vulnerabilities and share findings Amazon is a glass wing partner and anthropic investor. So why would they file a federal complaint PrsX put together a bunch of different posts to try to put together something of a timeline of what happened They argued that contrra to Anthropics's argument that every safeguard used in the industry is vulnerable to non universal jailbreaks, and they stated that clearly when they released Fable five Qote, My my best guess is that the US government did not fully realize this at the time when the release of Fable five was approved Prince added that per Axios, the government contacted Anthropic to ask to pause, releasing the models but was unsuccessful Or as they put it, Anthropic told the government to pound sand Now it's hard to wrap our heads around just how consequential this is Risha Sharma was one of many to point out that a huge number of anthropics technical staff, including no less than Andre Carpathy, are not U. S. citizens, but instead here on things like EB one visas meananing that even internally they are not allowed to interact with these models now. So where we sit, at least at seven thirty two AM Eastern time on Saturday morning, is that Fable and mythos are not available to anyone right now and you got to think that there is a flurry of behind the scenes activity trying to resolve this as fast as humanly possible So what is the chattering class thing? Dan Rustus on X teed up pretty much the entire conversation and he wrote, Am I mad at anthropic or the U.S. government Both Probably both Yeah, it's both. So let's talk first about the US government side or specifically the what the hell are you doing, US government side Many pointed out that the specific pretext for this banning is incredibly loose. AI entrepreneur Bundu Redady wrote, This is really stupid. The US banned fabled just because it responded with information that is already freely available on the internet Every other model can easily be made to respond to some silly questions about common security vulnerabilities or how to make drugs or whatever Cuelessness of the government is astounding In the Wall Street Journal, the CEO of cybersecurity from La Security, Katie Mooris wrote Who at the White House evaluated this and thought it was a threat? It's a complete overreaction because this is exactly the kind of prompting that defenders would do AI policy expert Dean Ball wrot I can't tell if this is lawfair against anthropic in particular or extreme national security hawery reggardless it's simply cartoonish. Council Foreign R relations Senior fellow Chris McGuire wrote If the Trump administration is so concerned about access to advanced AI models, why is it not enforcing the export controls currently on the books on advanced AI models, or the export controls that would require a license to buy large numbers of AI chips to make these models Now to be clear about Chris's position He later tweeted, I actually think targeted export controls on model access are prudent, but across the board controls on all countries on a single model without any warning is highly questionable Export controls are a critical tool and an extremely powerful one Used correctly, they have the potential to massively extend the U.S. lead in AI Incorrectly, they will stifle AI development The Department of Commerce's export control strategy has been completely incoherent and sabotaging. It is sending powerful AI chips to China, not enforcing controls that would prevent Chinese smuggling, creating massive loopholes that allow AI chips to be sent to China, and preventing USAI companies from releasing their own models. This has to stop urgently need a smart export control strategy that applies robust export controls to deny our adversaries access to advanced technology while advantaging U.S. companies. Commerce and BIS are consistently doing the opposite BIS doesn't understand how to use its authorities or what the implications are of its actions, then it needs to find some new personnel who can actually execute a competent export control strategy The cururrent one is incoherent and self defeating Many pointed out that it was also hypocritical Emerson Brookking from the Atlantic Council reshared a post from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from just a couple of weeks ago, when they bit back at the New York Times after the NYT reported that President Trump had signed an executive order asking tech companies to give the government oversight of new AI models before releasing them to the public At the time the White House account wrote, lazy and inaccurate reporting on this policy. The EO creates a process for frontier labs to voluntarily share cutting edge cyber models in order to secure critical infrastructure and strengthen the government's own cyber defenses. We are not conducting oversight of all new models, and here's the money quote That level of government overreach would have chilling effects on free speech and innovation Indeed, the policy seems so baffling For example, as Dean Ball again put it, an administration whose posture is that we should export advanced AI chips to China, which also wants to ban Britain and every other non American on Earth from using our best models, I have no words. Yes to many, the policy is so baffling that it feels distinctly personal preaging the next point we'll get into Josh Pigford wrot Anthropic has not done themselves any favors with their hyperbole over the past six to twelve months, but I also guarantee this has zero to do with national security. addding evidence to that is when the Department of War CIO Kirsten Davies tweeted We fully support Potis and the Secretary of War in prioritizing national security and the security of our warfighters, DIB partners, critical infrastructure, international partners and allies Some things are simply more important than revenue cycles, clickbait and pre IPO valuation I don't know who approved that tweet, and it could just be Davy's opinion, but that level of animosity specifically targeted at Anthropic makes it seem like this has pretty much nothing to do with Fable five and everything to do with the relationship between Anthropic and the government Well known tech journalist Ashley Vance writes, This strikes me as so petty and dumb on the government's part They want anthropic to do their bidding and are willing to hold the whole country back as a result Georgetown Laws Peter Harold is pissed. I find it ridiculous, he writes, and un American for the government to tell me as an American, I cannot use an advanced AI model because of a vague and non public alleged security threat. We should regulate AI, but based on transparent and impartial rules, and not five PM on a Friday diktoots Joe Palolitano writes, All of the worst impulses of the Trump presidency on full display No planner strategy, everything reactive, arbitrary and maximally invasive Anthropic is just repeatedly being singled out because they have insufficiently bent the knee. Putting it even more dramatically, LasanoX writes, Trump really wants to kill both open AI and anthropic, nationalize their tech, and then become the emperor of mankind. As much animosity as there is towards the U.S government Frankly, most of the industry's scn right now is being levied on anthropic itself AI buildilder Sarah Hooker writes, You have to be humble even when pursuing excellence. I think the arrogance with which Anthropic has pursued the latest release has universally landed poorly. It is presumed everyone else should just be grateful to touch the technology even if it is intentionally humobble and no one else should be given permission to develop the technology because it is too dangerous Jeremy Howard, who's no hyperbolic exposter hater, wrote I disagree with this decision and I don't like it, but also, how did Anthropic not see this coming It is the obvious response to this is too dangerous for anyone except us to use Since that relies on a premise, we are uniquely good that almost no one agrees with Dara Anut Maz has spent the last few days not being able to use Fable five because it knows that he is a biomedical researcher wrote Happy now, Dario Amede. You got your wish for government regulation after constant fearmongering to slow AI progress And Tropic has done tremendous damage to AI advancement, they succeeded in realizing this nightmare scenario It is a sad and grave day for America and humanity Now summing up the sentiment behind this was a three panel cartoon that went viral. In the first panel, a concerned looking Dario Amade says, This is the most dangerous AI yet. It could kill us all. It will destroy all global infrastructure. This can't be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. the middle panel,onald Trump says, Okaykay, it's banned And in the third and final panel, an aaplectic Dario says, you can't do this Investor entrepreneur and writer Willin Eeis was one of about a bajillion people to point back to an old quote from a recent anthropic blog post that said The government should have the power to block or deter deployment of the model if it is determined in light of third party assessment to present unacceptable risks Will points out, Dario forty eight hours ago. U.S government should be able to block model deployment US government export controls models. Dario says, notot like that Now, some trying to point out that Anthropic did actually try to address this in their blog post saying As we haveve stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts This action does not adhere to those principles Still even with that caveat, a whole lot of people felt like this was an F around find out kind of moment for anthropic Investor Nick Carter wrot I can't believe Anthropic comparing their product to nuclear weapons eight hundred times backfired on them. I am shocked Author Take Kim writes, So liivid right now. Anthropic, overhyped mythos scared the living daylights out of the clueless global politicians like Treasury Secretary Besset and ECB president Christine Lagard, and stokes a regulatory panic that may set back the entire AI industry Expressing the same sentiment, but with a slightly more dispassionate voice, entrepreneur John Enis wrote, My opinion is that Mythos is the current best model but not actually some world changing dangerous model, And that anthropic did their usual song and dance about safety, largely because they didn't have enough compute to serve it at scale So then they launched Fable because they still have to think about the IPO They are still somewhat compute limited, so they put all sorts of restrictions on it Around the same time because they are trying to get regulatory capture and not because things are actually dangerous. Dario did more scaremongering and published his honestly confusing white paper that offered no real solutions. So finally they succeeded, they managed to freak out the government, their cynical plan backfired and it's a giant pain in the butt. orr as Bantag simply put it They named it fable and then acted surprised when it came with a moral One thing I keep seeing in entnerprise AI, companies hedging across every cloud, every model, every framework or paying a GSI for a pilot that never ends The team's actually shipping, they've picked a lane and they move fast That's one of the reasons I like today' sponsor Rbots and pencils They've gone all in on AWS. They're an advanced tier and AWS pattern partner and they ship production AI coworkers in forty five days. That's led to them doing some of the more interesting work I've seen on AI coworkers. 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It's the leading agendic Systems platform that is unified, agile, and enterprise proven, allowing you to accelerate growth, reduce operational friction, and deliver real enterprise impact with AI Out systems, builduild your agentic future Now one thing that I will note is that to their credit, the safetyists are not dancing around excitedly Eliazer Yudkowski, who I disagree with pretty vehemently most of the time wrote, I can't tell today whether this ends up good or bad. International treaties to stop all further AI escalation would be a definite good. Things short of that complicated This has some bad aspects like selectivity and likely overrle And good aspects like pushing against the psychology of, but no government would ever dare tell AI companies to do anything, so give up or raising doubts that imped venture funding for ever bigger models. So please stop tweeting about how I must be celebrating this I'm not one of the kids who immediately goes into overacted victory paroxysms about any hit on a perceived enemy. I care about the effect on where things end up a year later and that's a little harder to know the first day, you know And in fact Trying to figure out where this leads days, weeks, months or years from now, was where a lot of the conversation resolved Aaron Levy stating almost the obvious bluntly writes, This is a big turning point for AI regulation. The government is starting to deem some models too powerful for certain uses, which creates a precedent for a range of possible controls in the future I'm in the camp that this is unnecessary and we should be primarily regulating the use of AI as opposed to the underlying models But equally there are plenty of people who actually prefer this outcome Either way, it's unlikely that we're going back to a world where the government doesn't have far more meaningful involvement in the rate of AI progress Andrew Friedman wrote, This is a moment we'll look back on as a major turning point in AI For years, people in this community have warned that AI policy would get weird, that these systems would grow powerful enough to put them on a collision course with our institutions, our economy, our governments. I don't know what caused this moment. I don't know what it means for future models. I can't tell if this is targeted specific to anthropic I can't think of a moralt act of government intervention in our capitalist society in my lifetime The policy just got weird. Pointing a new and I think, important term,terling Crispin wrote, The worst thing about this fable situation is that it just created precedents for capability thought crimes and drew a clear line in the sand going forward Are the next round of models going to need DOW clearance before release? New open source models? This is not good for progress Diel Jeffy' wrot We're seeing a speed runun of a hideous future play out. Nobody can build a business on this quicksand and uncertainty. If we continue with this wild gibbering, fear mongering and the fear based gated access, and if we create the regulatory capturing policies this insane and idiotic and incoherent fear pushes the clueless towards, we will absolutely guarantee that the future of intelligence gets built outside America Brian Zhao writes, If this sticks, this means Americans will need proof of citizenship to gain access to models on the level of mythos. That means potential ID verification notuts' clawed, but everywhere fable is served downstream Cursor, devin, open router, etcer A law firm that uses Harvey serving fable five will get impacted just the same Brian also writes, how's anthropics supposed to serve fable through API billing They will somehow have to figure out a way to verify citizenship of the end user API access will need to be drastically changed before access, even to American companies and citizens can be restored And of course, researchers at frrontier labs themselves will no longer be able to use their own models Brian points out also that open AI and Google Deepmind no longer have incentives to ship anything Mythos caliber until this is resolved If they release it, any company that can jailbreak the model can get export controls imposed on the model, and then they now have to deal with the same headaches Plus, any non US. partners with Mythos access through Project Glasswing get cut off. Now that the US has exercised its kill switch once, expect other countries to operate with the assumption that frontier access can and will be revoked unilaterally Honestly, one of the moments that I reminded of in AI history was when Sam Altman was first removed and then reinstated as openp AI CEO That was the beginning of the end of their relationship with Microsoft Now nominally Microsoft stuck with them, with Sata Nadeelp playing a behind the scenes role trying to get everything sorted out But from a sheer fiduciary responsibility standpoint, from that moment on, he had to start putting up walls with Open AI and building resilience at Microsoft that was outside of Open AI's models. The company had simply proven itself to be too capricious for Microsoft to trust it, and the entire history of how Microsoft has developed AI since has been shaped by that one moment Connor Brown is one of many to point out the comparisons to the nineteen nineties He wrote, Welcome to the AI Wars. We are now staring down the barrel of KYC and anti compute laundering laws for frontier models And this is just for mythos. What happens when we get further capability jumps The public have access to frontier intelligence ever again? We fought this battle in the nineties for free and open access to cryptography, but it was not easy. The fight this time around will be much harder and the stakes will be much higher Now one thing we haven't discussed yet, which I think is hugely important is the impact in markets Machine Learning Street Talk wrote, This will become a textbook example of how a company snatch defeat from the claws of victory BS game spectacularly backfired You reap what you sow Daniel Woo writes How does something like this not torpedo the AI intelligence explosion bull case? US government establishing precedent that access to anything as smart as Fable five, which is not RSI and nowhere near AGI will be banned Even if Anthropic could make the model accessible to U. S. nationals How will any customer ensure compliance seeing as not all employees of US enterprises are US. nationals So we have a situation where the labs need to spend increasing amounts of CapEx to build more powerful models but are restricted from monetizing them. I do not think the intelligence levels of Opus four eight and GPT five five are enough to justify anywhere close to the amount of AI CapEx being spent let alone projected to be spent And in that scary reality, one person who potentially has a target on their head is anthropic CEO Dario Amadee himself. Tech commentator Robert Skble writes, I can't see how Dario survives another week. Investors in anthropic are pissed at his leadership Lasano X again writes The realistic take on the anthropic situation Investing in AI companies has just become permanently more risky as the U.S. government could pull the plug at any moment GDP on X rights Anthropic IPO has been kneeapped. If Anthropic cannot offer the powerful models to the rest of the world, This reduces their global market share by twenty five percent. Is it then still a one trillion USD market cap company Open source is already near Opus and Sonnet and we'll cross that tier soon While I duly respect safety concerns, this is very broad and is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathw. The world is going to be split by model access. Lassan sharing the Wikipedia post for nineteen eighty seven's Black Monday event on Wall Street wrote Popping the AI bubble wasn't on my bingo card. I don't like to speculate on market reactions, and I hope that investors can be a little bit dispassionate. But I more or less am of the belief that at this point the entire American economy kind of rests on the relationship between anthropic and open AI's revenue continuing to go up and investors being willing to continue to fund the AI buildout I think the sheer tonnage of damage that this move from the US. government does, not just to anthropic, but to the entire US economy is hard to overstate. Certainly, everyone around the world who is not American has to be feeling very different about things than they were just a day ago BC Hamet Mahapha writes The sovereign AII's real moment is here. Nation states will soon start needing citizenship and or security clearances to work on their next state of the art models, the way they do for defense, space, and nuclear tech It's only a matter of time talalent Wars here will be crazy. Alex Patropolis writes, This should be a warning shot for all middle powers. Your access to frrontier AI systems is not guaranteed You need to build and pool your leverage to secure access failure to do so is a threat to your R and D, economic and defenseive competitiveness Galwina writes, Up until now the U.S. position against China has been, we are the rule of law, predictable, trustworthy provider. They are arbitrary and politically directed the asmmetry of the narrative just evaporated Any procurement officer in Brussels, Tokyo or Sao Paulo who watched this happen now has a defensible argument for sovereign AI hedging, EU model preference, or cautious experimentation with Chinese open weight alternatives The Deep seea andQen quality gap is small enough that this matters British politician Tom Tuganott wrot Disabling Fable five and other models for foreigners is not a misunderstanding or a mistake It's the inevitable result of technology shaping warfare so that sovereignty is more about code than canons with high energy costs and the emphasis on safety not opportunity Britain's response has been to build the brake, cutting ourselves off from the future and tide ourselves to the past. We cannot continue like this and remain sovereign the European's account on Twitter writes. The U.S. government has ordered the suspension of access to anthropics frrontier AI models, Fable five and Mythos five for all foreign nationals worldwide, citing national security concerns Now imagine a European company, hospital, ministry, or public administration that has built critical processes around a frontier AI model. From one day to the next, access disappears. Wflows stop, services are disrupted, teams scramble to migrate, millions are spent on energy replacements. This is what technological dependence looks like When access to critical technologies depends on decisions taken by foreign governments, Europe no longer fully controls its ability to act, compete, or innovate Witess Harvard's Ben Murphy. This is another step on the Balkanization of technology Malan X writes, The scariest part of this whole story is the dystopia looming on the horizon. It is the way the U.S government is literally creating a caste system based on access to intelligence This is even no longer a divide between rich and poor. It's a divide between those who are allowed to think at the frontier level, accelerate science and medicine, create breakthrough technologies, and those who simply happen to be citizens of another country This is a new kind of iron curtain digital intellectual. and if they are testing this on anthropic knows who they will come for tomorrow I have no idea what happens next. One has to think that the base case is that this gets reversed in some way But make no mistake, this is an incredibly dramatic step I will of course continue to bring updates as they happen, but for now that's going to do it for this emergency episode of the AI Daily Brief. Toomorrow I'll be moving things around a little bit and releasing the short weekly recap episode that I've been experimenting with and then pushing what was originally going to be the longong Read Sunday episode for some timee in the next week or so Big thanks for listening and watching as always, and until next time Pace.