The decision was made due to suspicions of access to the system by Chinese developers, as well as critical vulnerabilities that Amazon warned the government about.
The decision was made due to suspicions of access to the system by Chinese developers, as well as critical vulnerabilities that Amazon warned the government about.
According to sources familiar with the situation, on Friday the White House ordered Anthropic to limit access to the models exclusively to US citizens. Since this rule would prohibit even foreign employees of Anthropic itself from using the development, the company decided to completely remove these products from the market.
Anthropic released the Mythos model in April and tightly controlled access to it, granting it only to select companies to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The developers stressed that the model posed a danger to the public because of its ability to find bugs in computer code that could be exploited by attackers. According to the sources, access to such a system by the Chinese government could pose a threat to US national security and would also allow it to copy the technology through a process known as distillation.
New details about the incident have been revealed by presidential advisor David Sachs. According to him, the government received a warning that the consumer version of the Fable 5 model, which was released early last week with built-in security barriers, could be “hacked.” Sachs claims that when the administration notified the company about this, Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei called the vulnerability insignificant and refused to fix it. This, according to the advisor, is what forced the government to implement strict export restrictions.
Amazon told the White House about the vulnerability, and its CEO Andy Jassy personally contacted administration representatives.
An Anthropic representative said the White House did not raise the issue of access from China during discussions about the Fable vulnerabilities. The company also emphasized that access to its products from China is systematically blocked.
Amazon, for its part, did not deny the fact of contacts with the government. “It is not unusual for governments to contact us for advice on potential security risks. When this happens, we do not disclose the details of such discussions,” a company representative commented.
Recall that it was previously reported that the United States has six to twelve months before China gains access to American advanced artificial intelligence models, such as Mythos , or creates its own analogues capable of carrying out large-scale cyberattacks.
