On June 2, about a week before Anthropic released its Claude Fable 5 model, it announced it had added 150 new organizations to Project Glasswing, the program that allowed (theoretically) trustworthy companies, governments, and other entities to try out the cybersecurity capabilities of Anthropic’s (theoretically) too-dangerous-to-release AI model, Claude Mythos Preview.
This, according to a new report from the Washington Post, was part of the move that placed Anthropic on a collision course with the dramatic export control directive from the White House that essentially got Fable 5, Anthropic’s flagship consumer model, taken offline on Friday.
Here, however, it’s worth pausing on a disclosure in the Washington Post’s anonymously sourced story: “Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.” This is worth keeping in mind in light of the fact that, according to a (once again anonymously sourced) Wall Street Journal story from Saturday, the triggering event for the White House’s export control directive was a tip from current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, saying Amazon researchers had demonstrated that they could jailbreak Fable and make it perform cybersecurity tasks that it wasn’t supposed to be allowed to perform.
At any rate, the Post says weeks ago, Anthropic showed the Trump administration a list of 111 organizations it was planning to add to Project Glasswing, and then apparently disclosed that “roughly 50 additional entities had already received access.” One of these was apparently a telecommunications company in South Korea that the Trump Administration believed had “ties to China.”
Previous reporting had touched on this supposed China connection, but vaguely. A story from Semafor on Saturday made mention of it without clarity about how much earlier this was. “It’s unclear how the White House learned of the issue, which organization accessed the model, and how it gained access to Mythos,” Semafor wrote at the time. Well now it’s somewhat clearer: Anthropic simply gave access to one organization, but the White House had deemed it too close to China. The Post says Anthropic revoked this mystery organization’s access, but not without getting Trump Administration officials hopping mad.
So according to this new framing of events, the export control directive was already locked and loaded. And the findings of the Amazon researchers were the last straw.
