Anthropic's Mythos Recall and the White House's Missing AI Safety Playbook

On June 10, Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post titled, “Policy on the AI Exponential.” He wrote that in recent months “the evidence of AI’s incredible power, as well as its risks, has become undeniable.” He pointed to his company’s product, Mythos, as the “emblematic example” of the threat that frontier models pose to national security. “We need to activate a slow and rickety policy apparatus to deal with risks and opportunities that are going to compound surprisingly quickly from here,” Amodei wrote. He called for “mandatory testing by a qualified third party” of model risks in four areas: (1) cybersecurity, (2) biological weapons, (3) loss of control of AI systems, and (3) “automated R&D that could accelerate these other risks.”

Just two days later, on June 12, Anthropic announced it received a letter from the US Department of Commerce notifying the company that the government had “issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.” To satisfy the government’s demand, the company said it had disabled access to the two models for all its customers.