San Francisco (United States) (AFP) – Anthropic said Friday it has suspended access to two powerful AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, to comply with a US national security order. Just three days after publicly launching Fable 5, the company stated in a blog post that it received a government directive banning all foreign nationals, even those who work at Anthropic, from accessing Fable 5 and Mythos 5 over national security concerns.
“The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance,” it explained. The company reported that it received the letter at 5:21 pm (2121 GMT) Friday. Axios reported that the letter came from US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. US Commerce officials did not immediately respond to a request from AFP.
The firm mentioned that the letter did not specify what exactly concerned the government. However, the company’s “understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking,'” the Fable 5 model such that it could assist in hacking. Fable 5, released Tuesday, is a locked-down version of Mythos 5, a cutting-edge AI model that Anthropic has withheld from the public due to concerns over its unprecedented ability to identify software vulnerabilities—also known as holes in code that hackers might exploit. Mythos 5, the unrestricted model, has only been released to select companies.
The European Union, which gained access to Mythos earlier in June after weeks of negotiations, noted that the latest development further underscored “Europe’s need for technological sovereignty.” “We take note of Anthropic’s statement and are assessing,” stated Thomas Regnier, a spokesman for the European Commission, which recently unveiled measures aimed at reducing the 27-nation bloc’s dependence on America and Asia for key technologies, including AI.
Anthropic reported that it had reviewed the “jailbreaking” method at the center of the speculation as well as the hacking opportunities it might expose. However, the firm does not believe that Fable 5 provides hackers with capabilities not already accessible through other public models. The firm indicated that none of its security testers had discovered a “universal jailbreak,” or way to bypass its safeguards against aiding hackers.
“We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people,” the company stated. “If this standard were applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”
Anthropic has been engaged in a legal standoff with the Trump administration for refusing to allow its technology to potentially be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, which led the Pentagon to cut contracts with the company.
© 2024 AFP
