Policy

TL;DR Fable 5 returns globally on 1 July 2026 on Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and the Claude Platform, after export controls were lifted on 30 June The recall was triggered by an Amazon research report describing a jailbreak that let Fable 5 identify software vulnerabilities; Anthropic’s testing found Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, Kimi K2.7, and others could do the same A new safety classifier blocks the specific technique in over 99% of cases; blocked requests fall back to Opus 4.8 Anthropic argues the jailbreak was minor - it intruded into the model’s deliberate “safety margin”, not its core harmful capabilities Together with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, Anthropic is drafting a shared jailbreak severity framework (capability gain, breadth, ease of weaponisation, discoverability) - the AI equivalent of CVSS Mythos 5 is restored for a set of US Glasswing partners; broader international access remains under government coordination Eighteen days ago I wrote about the government order that pulled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 off the shelf - four days after launch, a verbal export control directive at 5:21pm ET, global suspension for every user including Anthropic’s own staff. The open question in that post was whether access would be restored in days or weeks, and whether the precedent would reshape how every frontier lab ships models. ...

TL;DR On 12 June 2026 at 5:21pm ET, the US government issued an export control directive ordering Anthropic to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 - globally, for every user, including Anthropic’s own employees The stated reason is national security: the government believes it has identified a method of jailbreaking Fable 5. Anthropic says the evidence was verbal only and describes a narrow, non-universal technique - essentially asking the model to read a codebase and fix software flaws Anthropic reviewed a demonstration and found it surfaced a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities that are widely available from other models Anthropic disagrees that a narrow jailbreak justifies recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people, and warns the same standard would “essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers” All other Anthropic models are unaffected. The company says it believes this is a misunderstanding and is working to restore access Four days. That is how long Mythos-class capability lasted as a publicly available product before the US government ordered it off the shelf. ...

Dario Amodei has published a new essay, Policy on the AI Exponential, and it reads like the third act of a trilogy. Machines of Loving Grace made the case for what powerful AI could give us. The Adolescence of Technology catalogued what could go wrong. This one is about the machinery in between - the laws, agencies, and international arrangements that will decide which of those two essays turns out to be the better prediction. ...

For most of the AI conversation in 2024 and 2025, the binding constraints on the build-out were chips and capital. By 2026 the conversation has shifted, and the constraint that gets discussed most seriously inside the hyperscalers is electricity. Not the cost of electricity. The actual physical availability of electrons - at gigawatt scale, in the places where the data centres need to be, on the schedule the model labs need them to be. The story does not have a single villain or a single number, but it has a shape, and the shape is becoming the story of the second half of the decade. ...

TL;DR “AI safety” covers four distinct layers - product safety, system safety, model alignment, and civilisational safety - and conflating them produces incoherent debates For engineers building production systems today, system safety dominates: most real incidents trace back to flawed system design around the model, not the model itself Practical mitigations are unglamorous: scope tool permissions, bound blast radius, require human approval for irreversible actions, validate outputs, and observe everything The hype conflates capability with intent, existential risk with ordinary risk, and refusal with safety - all three conflations make the conversation harder to act on The load-bearing principle across all four layers is the same: a system should fail in ways that are detectable, recoverable, and bounded The AI safety conversation has reached the point where the phrase has stopped meaning anything specific. In the same week, you will see “AI safety” used to describe content moderation on a chat product, the alignment of frontier models toward human values, the question of whether superintelligence ends civilisation, and a regulatory paper about copyright. These are not the same problem. Treating them as one conversation is the reason the conversation never resolves. ...