Decision on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models means the U.S. has a licensing regime for frontier AI—it just doesn’t want to admit it

With its decision on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable, the Trump administration has created a de facto licensing regime that throws into question the trajectory of frontier AI development.

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…Anthropic scrambles to try to reverse U.S. export controls on its Fable and Mythos models…the U.S. government decision on Anthropic’s models causes panic in Europe over AI sovereignty and delight among China’s open source AI developers…OpenAI’s finances revealed…a new benchmark shows AI agents may not be as capable as you think…and courts are turning to AI for transcripts but the reasons may not be what you think.

This week’s biggest news is obviously the U.S. government’s decision to impose export controls on Anthropic’s newest and most powerful AI models, Fable and Mythos, after researchers at Amazon found a way to jailbreak some of Fable’s cybersecurity guardrails. The decision forced Anthropic to disable the two AI models for all users, since American “deemed export” rules mean that allowing any foreign national, including those who work for Anthropic, to access the models would violate the law. Anthropic has been scrambling to try to get the export controls rescinded, sending a delegation of high level executives to Washington earlier this week to try to hash out a compromise with the government. But so far, no deal has been reached.

The government decision has wide ranging implications and sparked all kinds of reactions. Those who think Anthropic uses “fear-based marketing”—hyping the dangerous potential of its models as a kind of psychologically-crafty way of touting its models as the most capable on the market—reacted with schadenfreude, declaring that Anthropic was only reaping what it sowed. (AI “godfather” Yann LeCun, who has been dismissive of AI’s existential risks, was among those endorsing this view.) Others, who think Anthropic is sincere in its communication about its models’ dangers, were more divided on the decision. Some were willing to give the government some benefit of the doubt and think Anthropic may have been reckless in releasing Fable, which was supposed to offer many of the benefits of Mythos without the cyber security and bio weapons risks, but which may not, in fact, have had robust enough guardrails.

Many cyber security experts, however, say the Fable jailbreak Amazon discovered did not unlock potential offensive cyber abilities that are not also currently available from other AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, which are not being subjected to export controls. More than 100 cyber and tech policy experts signed an open letter stating that Fable and Mythos, were essential tools for cyber defenders to find and patch vulnerabilities in their own systems and that these benefits outstripped the risk attackers might jailbreak Fable. 

Clearly Amazon must have thought the jailbreak was a serious concern—its CEO Andy Jassy personally made a call to the White House about the issue. But there is still much we don’t know about exactly what the internal debate was within Amazon. The e-commerce and cloud giant has invested $13 billion into Anthropic, and committed to investing up to $20 billion more in the coming years, and it remains unclear exactly how Amazon weighed the risks to its investment in the AI startup against the national security concerns it raised with the U.S. government, and how exactly Jassy characterized the risks from Anthropic’s models compared to others on the market. While some conspiracy-minded analysts have suggested Amazon may have had commercial reasons to torpedo Anthropic’s models, those theories make little sense to me, and I think we still need to hear from Amazon more about exactly why it took the steps it did and exactly what Jassy said in his calls with the administration. 

A licensing regime by another name

What is clear, however, is that the U.S. government now has a mandatory licensing regime for frontier AI. It is just not a transparent, de jure one. Instead, it is ad hoc and opaque. Jonathan Iwry, a fellow at the Wharton Accountable AI Lab, told my colleague Beatrice Nolan, “we see the government repurposing existing legal authorities into what is effectively a backdoor licensing regime.” Dean Ball, the libertarian AI policy thinker who briefly helped the Trump administration shape its AI policy last year but who has now emerged as a fierce critic of the government’s recent AI decisions, put it this way: 

AI is licensed now, but the requirements change constantly and are always a secret, even to the administration itself, which will discover the rules spontaneously in real time as it reacts to events. This means also that the rules are in practice stricter and more roughly enforced for organizations the administration does not like.

Ball says the situation is made worse by the administration’s “insistence that it is Not Regulating AI. This has become an excuse for vagueness and evasiveness in rule-drafting…and this in turn makes the lawlessness worse.” He says the government “has discovered that ‘not regulating AI’ is in fact a great excuse for refusing to support laws that could constrain the admin’s power.”

As was the case with the administration’s earlier—and also unprecedented—decision to label Anthropic a “supply chain risk” for refusing to agree to the Pentagon’s preferred contract terms, the arbitrary and capricious use of government power to punish, and perhaps even destroy, a company that has not violated any law ought to be concerning to every American business.

Some have said it is ironic that Anthropic, whose CEO Dario Amodei has called for an FDA-like agency to regulate AI and license frontier AI models, is now complaining about being regulated. But I have a great deal of sympathy for Anthropic’s statement that it wants “a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts.” We should all want that. And this is the opposite.

Private development of frontier AI in the U.S. now in doubt

Even if we do move towards a statutory process, there are tough decisions ahead about exactly how that process should work and what the thresholds for blocking deployment of an AI model should be. Frontier AI models are inherently dual use, and they do possess significant cyber security risks. If the history of U.S. export controls is any guide, the road ahead for U.S. frontier model companies is going to be rocky unless they start training models without any significant coding and biological knowledge. Of course, that obviates many of these models’ best use cases. Still it might allow AI companies to continue to sell models that are useful in many business contexts. Those who argue that the export control ruling is good news for VCs who have been backing startups working on narrow AI applications in specific professional verticals are probably not wrong. Those narrow AI models are much less likely to run afoul of U.S. export licensing.

On the other hand, the same logic that led the administration to block Fable and Mythos leads, perhaps inevitably, to the nationalization of frontier AI. (AGI is, after all, perhaps the most potent dual use technology there is. It’s not clear how the U.S. could ever allow it to be exported.) I don’t buy conspiracy theories currently circulating on social media that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have somehow colluded to position themselves as the only government-approved gatekeepers to frontier AI models, arguing they are best positioned to exercise strict know-your-customer rules, but I do think it is possible we will end up in exactly that scenario.

What do you think? Let me know and I will try to publish some of your views in next week’s newsletter.

In the meantime, here’s more AI news. 

Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn

The following newsletter sections were compiled this week with help from Lulu Nairn.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com