Amazon security research reportedly led to White House restricting Anthropic AI model
Amazon's cybersecurity research prompted the U.S. government to impose export controls that limited Anthropic's access to its Fable 5 model, sparking a dispute between the company and the administration.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, the export control directive that forced Anthropic to restrict access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models was partly triggered by cybersecurity research from Amazon and conversations between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and the White House.
Amazon's research claimed that through a series of prompts, it was able to get Fable 5 to provide information that could be used in cyberattacks. Shortly after Jassy shared the findings with the government, it decided to block foreign nationals from using the model. This is complicated by the fact that many Anthropic researchers are foreign-born, meaning they were barred from accessing their own product.
Anthropic disputed the government's characterization of the issue as a "jailbreak," arguing that many of the same vulnerabilities could be found using other publicly available models, including GPT 5.5. Some security researchers appear to back Anthropic's interpretation. Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of LutaSecurity, posted on BlueSky that the paper is not a jailbreak. Former Commerce Department official Kate Koren speculated that the White House's dislike of Anthropic may have influenced the decision.
Anthropic and the Trump administration have been at odds over the company's refusal to allow its AI to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or to power lethal autonomous weapons. In February, Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's AI, and hours later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated the company a supply chain risk.
The government and the company seemed to have made amends, working together to expand access to Mythos. However, now the two appear destined to clash again.
