Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

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I submitted separately, but this Axios report has some details that call a lot of the speculation in this thread into question, i.e. that this wasn't much of a "jailbreak" at all and that it's not Anthropic-specific - the White House intends to generally regulate Mythos-class models (whatever exactly that means):

Between the lines: The government's response "seems way out of line with what's actually in the research report," Luta Security CEO Katie Moussouris, who Anthropic shared the Amazon report with, told Axios.

Moussouris said the researchers were able to find security vulnerabilities by asking questions normal defenders would ask AI, which is exactly what the model was intended to do.

An administration official told Axios they do not view other models as national security threats because they do not surpass the bar that Mythos set.

Anything at Mythos level or above would need to go through the administration to ensure the government's national security apparatus is hardened enough, the official added.

https://www.axios.com/2026/06/13/anthropic-amazon-white-hous...

The governments national security apparatus was using a public signal group and invited a reporter into it. I don't think we should use them as the standard for secure.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev... the government using this terminology shouldn't be entrusted to make such decisions.

That’s a terrible way to create AI regulations

If they actually cared about this issue we’d have predictable laws and regulatory bodies that let companies actually plan

There’s a reason royal fiat doesn’t lead to healthy economies. It’s just confusing and chaotic. It’s not clear why anyone would invest in a new model now.

Then the next administration comes in and instantly, by fiat, they decide to lift the ban. The market just gets jerked around with no ability to plan long term investments.

> That’s a terrible way to create AI regulations

This administration doesn't do regulations, its extortion. Same as the tariffs. Just grease someone's palm and then the vague restriction is lifted.

I still can get de minimus from China no problem, as long as it’s Ali express. I wonder why? When anthropic answers that question, we will have access to fable again.

And that is the same as previous administrations, now you just see it openly.

It’s a great way to regulate if you’re corrupt. When the rules are opaque and arbitrary, there’s a lot more room for corruption.

In a parallel universe where we have Biden (or Democratic Party) administration, how different do you think the regulations / approach would be for this fast moving and unpredictable technology?

They at least wouldn't depend on how extensively you publicly glaze the President.

They probably would have been in line with Executive Order 14110, the Biden administration's detailed description of a principled approach to regulation of the AI industry. It would have been aligned with the Trump administration's stated goals as well, but a coalition of rich VCs successfully bribed him to rescind it as one of his first acts in office, because the primary principle of Trumpist government is that people who pay Donald Trump a lot of money get what they want.

It’s hard not to see this ban as being motivated by retribution for refusing to use the models for spying and autonomous warfare.

Probably using the rule of law in some way? Talking about it in public? Legislating? You know... government type stuff?

It doesn’t really matter what party does it

The ideal case is a statutory agency with regulatory authority that sets very clear standards for what model capabilities can and cannot release. Those are set ahead of time and well known by frontier model providers.

Most normal regulations are managed through the administrative procedures act process. That’s a legal requirement that involves deliberation and public comment.

I’d argue you could pretty easily enumerate most capabilities that have been obvious concerns for a while. For example, cyber security.

This structure can last decades and reassure players they can operate in the market without rules changing suddenly without warning.

Some kind of sudden, temporary action like this export control tool is legally fragile. Even if sometimes necessary in exceptional cases. But if the administration sees this as a permanent way of working, they won’t be helping anyone (but maybe themselves through grift).

If the administration truly cares about functional regulation (which maybe they don’t) they need a sturdier legal structure that lasts past Trump. Not flimsy edicts that change with the wind

I wholeheartedly agree with what you’re saying in general. I do wonder though, given how rapid advancements in AI are occurring, if even an agency with statutory authority would be able to establish a predictable regulatory environment, let alone do so while maintaining a lengthy public comment period and a whole of government approach. There are obvious flaws with the current administration’s approach to, well, almost everything. But I’m not sure if this is even a tractable problem with the governance structures we have been employing over the last 50 years.

Nothing being talked about with Mythos wasn’t a known AI risk 12 months ago. Those rules could have been established to guide frontier labs.

But yes crazy things happen. Maybe it won’t catch everything.

The right answer are giving the govt / this agency explicit legal, short term model pause capabilities to let the rule making process happen if something completely out of band happens. Or let the agency study/approve models prior to release.

Not sudden, unexpected application of export laws.

Yet in this case, for Fable, cybersecurity risks have been well know for some time. A rule created years ago when we knew this would happen could have given frontier labs and the market predictability.

> Nothing being talked about with Mythos wasn’t a known AI risk 12 months ago. Those rules could have been established to guide frontier labs.

Is there a jurisdiction that HAS created legislation or regulations that takes it into account? I would think that if it is super easy to foresee and formulate practical and effective regulations for AI, then it must already exist somewhere.

There is not a single chance this would have happened under that admin. Not one single chance.

Not that I'm ever one to support anything this regime does but I'm kind of okay with them pumping the brakes on this until we really get a handle on what the

The USG has limited capabilities on technologies from GPS chips to thermal imaging with "national security" implications for a while and now they're doing it but it seems people don't like how ill defined "Mythos-class" means. Would it be better if it was some %X on some benchmark that the frontier model peddlers could just limbo under to make it "acceptable" for release? Do we just accept that jailbreaking will never be prevented?

The part of all this I do have a problem with is the national state cybersecurity cat-and-mouse this kicks off. Will the US tech landscape have enough time to safely get a "Mythos-class" model to harden itself before China releases or leverages a "Mythos-class" cyber munition?

> The USG has limited capabilities on technologies from GPS chips

Are you referring to Selective Availability? That ended decades ago.

Selective Availability accuracy restrictions ended decades ago, but GPS technology is still subject to various military and export-control restrictions.

Not selective availability. COCOM Limits that prevent a GPS chip from operating above a certain speed and altitude.

It’s funny because it’s just (relativistic) math. It would cost a couple hundred bucks to roll your own with no restrictions.

"pumping the brakes" would be fine. This is slamming to a full stop on a crowded freeway and causing a three car pile-up. Warning and advanced notice are the difference between regulation and tyranny, and in this case we're just getting tyranny

> and in this case we're just getting tyranny

You expected different with this administration?

Of course I expect the government to act better than this! But I am not so naive as to assume my expectations will be met.

A broken clock is still occasionally right.

Given the current climate I'd be inclined to declare "tyranny" also but in this case I think given the degree of potential damage the slamming on of brakes is warranted when the alternative is, to strain a metaphor, going full speed off a cliff at relativistic speeds.

I'm feeling strong alignment with your perspective here. Thanks

Yeah, we have a lot of critical infrastructure connected to the internet. Based on the trend the last few weeks, I expect major cyber attacks this year.

I expect that to happen no matter what we do (since the open source models are rapidly catching up), but gating access to the frontier models for a while sounds like a reasonable precaution — as annoying as it is to me personally, to be deprived of such shiny toys!

Fable is a massive step up and I didn't expect it public for another month or two. Something tells me we'll get it back in a few weeks though.

The government software infrastructure has holes that makes Swiss cheese look solid as a rock.

There is no way these systems could be secured in a decade, but I don’t believe they will even try. Knowing developers that have walked those halls, it is not and will not be a priority.

Expect systems to start failing.

Fable was already out for three days. They could have made the call before it was released. They could have given Anthropic the weekend to fix the bug. They could have publicly announced what the issue is once Fable was offline (and they regularly do announcements on the weekends).

If the brakes really were warranted, the administration still screwed up terribly by leaving it out in the open for 3 days. But I'm not aware of any major tragedies in that 3-day window, so I have trouble believing it's really as dangerous as they say.

They didn't slam on the brakes though. They asked access to be limited to US citizens which ended up being hard to implement but is implementable and IMO addresses zero real concerns.

I have no insider information so this is all appreciation, but:

When it comes to legislative things, there is pretty much always a timeline in which to become compliant. I do wonder if there was opportunity to give warning etc. but Anthropic decided to perform an immediate full stop deliberately causing the metaphorical three-car pileup, because the more painful for the users, the more pressure from the people there will be on the government to undo this.

See also: those painfully annoying cookie banners that are malicious compliance in the most irritating way possible, which GDPR does not require, in order to make people think GDPR is dumb.

Same problem as always. This administration never figured out that how you do things matters. They love the drama of the crash more than actually implementing functional policies.

The goal of this administration has never been effective policy or at least not policy effective at doing things other than self-enrichment and disenfranchisement.

It's not even that. If Anthropic finds a way to variate citizenship the cat is back out of the bag. None of the AI-related worries I've ever heard about are addressed by limiting access to US citizens.

Easy. You just have to have a good relationship with POTUS administration to have your investment secure.

Why amazon? I bet the three letters had a hissy fit field day worrying that their expensive hancrafted zero days would evaporate and software would get more secure. So, the government is throwing a wrench for the NSA

Interesting. Hope there is any clarification on what "Mythos level" is and why 5.5-cyber doesn't arise to it. Any metric I could come up with (parameters, pre-train compute, benchmark scores, etc.) seems somewhere between imperfect and utterly nonsensical. Pure speculation, but GPT-5 series models including the new 5.5 pre-train appear far closer to Sonnet than Opus or Fable in pure parameter count, so maybe that's it, but the "they do not surpass the bar that Mythos set" line sounds more like there is a believe that Mythos/Fable are more capable in cybersecurity tasks, whereas the data [0] doesn't seem to bare this out. I did not do any cybersecurity assessment of Fable 5 myself, partly due to personal reasons that make that something I'm abstaining from, but my coding evals showed that while task adherence and assessment wise it was neck and neck with 5.5, the task inference was a major jump again (something prior Anthropic models tended to already do incredibly well on) and while that makes it a far better model to work with for UX experiments, I don't see how that translates to cybersecurity, along with the aforementioned publicly available evals by AISI.

Seeing as neither Mythos nor GPT-5.5 had been pre-trained with a particular focus on cybersecurity, this would have to mean any model that benchmarks better than GPT-5.4 or Opus 4.6 on these tasks cannot be used by None-US-Citizens. If such guidance isn't enforced for all US labs, I think that's irrefutable evidence that this isn't about cybersecurity or "the bar that Mythos set"...

[0] https://xcancel.com/AISecurityInst/status/205458976317312633...

Firefox bugs found per month, actively advertised as a sign of how powerful Mythos is: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

I am, thus far, not aware of 5.5-Cyber managing anything similar to "Project Glasswing"

That said, the government also knew about Mythos since Project Glasswing was announced... April 7th, two months ago, so if they wanted to block a public release, they had more than enough time to do it in an orderly way.

And basically every sign that Mythos is well above the previous baseline was pretty publicly known by early May, when we started getting stuff like the Firefox bug reports.

I can see an argument that Mythos is just barely a "cut above" enough to regulate, but I cannot see any argument for doing this by a fiat order three days after the release.

Let everyone feed their hardest problems for a week. Get their data for free without giving much in return. Just a thought.

Anyway you guys are trying to extrapolate reason and fairness from politics and bureaucratic logic. Amazon concerns even if unfunded triggered US Gov action which demanded Anthropic to pause Fable. Anthropic didn't comply and is being made an example via export restriction.

> the White House intends to generally regulate Mythos-class models (whatever exactly that means)

This is not at all surprising. And I hope people don't make the mistake that it's a "this administration" problem.

It was obviously from the early days of these LLMs that the shoe was going to drop and we (as Joe public) would not retain access. I mean that once ChatGPT3 dropped it was clear there was some level of functionality at which we would be denied further access.

The only carve out will be as per older technical innovations the US is more concerned with foreign national access than US citizen access at home.

I don't remember the details with encryption but it was basically you have to ship a breakable version for the rest of the world, and you generally sometimes ship a backdoored version.

And Anthropic is more concerned by what they are asked to do to US citizens than the broader group.

Same story with encryption, CPUs, GPUs, blah blah blah.

Yet unlike CPUs/GPUs, there's currently zero way to lock down who has access.

Giving access to 'citizens', with the current way the Internet operates, is absurd. One back door into a desktop, workstation, and 'validated citizens' are now 'hackers from where-ever'.

>and 'validated citizens' are now 'hackers from where-ever'.

Yes, because knowledge is power, and information is meant to be free.

    > This is not at all surprising. And I hope people don't make the mistake that it's a "this administration" problem.

It seems logical for govts to want to regulate AI/LLMs. In the US, would it be FCC (comms) or something new?

> I don't remember the details with encryption but it was basically you have to ship a breakable version for the rest of the world, and you generally sometimes ship a backdoored version.

I do remember the details: the result of Bernstein v. United States was that you have a First Amendment right to publish code because it is a speech act and so the USGOV cannot prevent you from publishing effective encryption algorithms. Will model weights be afforded the same protection? What about serving a model without publishing its weights? We shall see.

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