Apparently The Real Reason Anthropic’s Models Are Offline: A Six-Year-Old Trump Grudge

from the it-always-gets-dumber dept

Yesterday we wrote about the Trump administration forcing Anthropic to shut down Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The short version: dumb. Today, Axios got White House officials on the record, and it turns out the real reason is even dumber than we thought. In that original piece, we had pointed out that cybersecurity expert Katie Moussouris had been able to review the jailbreak and found that it was actually a useful way for cybersecurity defenders to fix and patch cybersecurity flaws, rather than a tool to be weaponized.

As we noted in that piece, it’s entirely possible that there was some real danger involved in the jailbreak, but we doubted that the administration would be honest about it. And it sounds like we were right to be suspicious. Axios got White House officials on record with the actual reason: Anthropic had asked Moussouris to review the jailbreak, and the administration decided she was a “radical Democrat.” That’s it. That’s the reason the models are offline.

• “We never wanted this to happen. Our number one priority is innovation but our hands were tied,” the White House official said.
• The optics added fuel to the fire. Anthropic came out with a blog post dismissing the Amazon report. Then the company enlisted a cybersecurity expert viewed by the administration as a “radical Democrat,” who was then celebrated by Chris Krebs, who Trump just fired.

First off, Krebs wasn’t “just fired.” Krebs was fired (somewhat famously) all the way back in 2020, and not because he’s some sort of “radical Democrat,” but because he pointed out that the 2020 election was shown to have been quite secure. And since that ruined Trump’s big lie that he had really won the election, he had to fire Krebs (whom he had hired in the first place).

So… it appears that the Trump admin shut down the most advanced versions of Anthropic’s AI tools not because they posed a serious risk… but because Anthropic asked someone to review the supposed threat, and that person got a shout-out from someone Trump hates for once telling the truth about election cybersecurity.

As promised, this story just keeps getting stupider.

Axios, as it’s known to do, doesn’t emphasize how absolutely fucking bonkers all of this is, but does its usual horse race nonsense, suggesting that if only Anthropic had sucked up to Trump’s ego more, all of this mess could have been avoided:

“Anthropic has not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration and appreciate the ideological differences,” one source familiar with the administration’s thinking said.

• “It’s like they just speak in different languages,” the source said, adding that the company has simply not figured out how to communicate with this administration.

Oh come on. This is the presidential administration of the most powerful country on earth, and we’re supposed to accept that companies need to tiptoe around “appreciating ideological differences” or face having their entire service banned? Who in their right mind would think that’s reasonable?

The Axios piece concludes with the dumbest suggestion on this entire thing: that it’s somehow Anthropic that needs “an attitude fix.”

• Absent that, a source familiar with the administration’s thinking said it may simply come down to an attitude fix where, instead of feeling dismissed, “everyone feels safe, secure and happy.”

Anyone who thinks it’s Anthropic’s fault for not hiring a MAGA chud to lobby on their behalf is simply endorsing blatant corruption. But in this era of cowed political journalists, apparently framing capitulation to that corruption as savvy PR advice is the only thing they can think of.

In the meantime, dozens of the biggest names in cybersecurity have signed onto a “Free Fable” letter, telling the administration how incredibly counterproductive all of this is:

It is our understanding that underlying model capabilities in the original research that triggered this action:

• Were focused on determining whether a human-prompted section of code was insecure. This is a necessary capability in any model that is intended to write secure code and should not be considered an offensive capability.
• Can be replicated on GPT-5.5, Opus, Sonnet and even Chinese models like Kimi 2.7. The justification for this unprecedented action was that Fable provides a unique “uplift” of capabilities beyond other AI models, but AI has been finding bugs and generating working exploits at superhuman levels since last year.
• Anthropic is addressing the research. As security professionals, we recognize that our work does not lead to a simple end-state where a system is fully safe, and the purpose of research like this is to enable continuous improvement, not to ban the technology.

As a result, this action has taken the best models away from defenders, created market uncertainty, and risked America’s AI leadership without any real risk to justify it.

Yeah, sure, but did you see that Anthropic hired someone who got a thumbs-up from someone Trump fired six years ago! In the MAGA universe, that’s all that actually matters.

So we have dozens of the top cybersecurity professionals around saying that this administration just deliberately weakened American defenses, handing an advantage to adversaries… all because of some weird partisan freakout. And the administration’s response is that it’s Anthropic that needs an “attitude fix”?

Filed Under: ai, chris krebs, corruption, donald trump, fable 5, katie moussouris, maga, mythos, politics

Companies: anthropic