Was the Mythos Ban Justified? (Good Idea. Bad Execution.) | AI Reality Check

Arguably, the only topic that's more controversial than AI criticism at the moment is really any mention of the Trump administration. Well, late last week, both of these topics came together creating a tidal wave of chaos and recrimination. Here's what happened if you haven't been following. Back in April, Anthropic announced that their new large language model, which they called Claude Mythos, was so good at finding bugs in computer code that it was too dangerous to release to the public. Here were their exact words. The fallout for economies, public safety, and national security could be severe. Okay. Fast forward to last week when Anthropic essentially said, hey. Good news. We added guardrails to Mythos, and now it is safe. They call this protected version of the model Fable five, and they made it widely available. On Friday, the US government said, not so fast. Now according to David Sacks, who was until recently the White House AI czar, the administration had heard from an independent researcher they trusted who said that he had easily evaded the guardrails that had been added to Fable five. The commerce department promptly placed Fable five and its unprotected version, Mythos five, on an export control list, which means the company must suspend access to the model from all foreign nationals, which presumably includes many of Anthropic's own employees who are here on visas and are foreign nationals. They said they won't lift this restriction until Anthropic fixes the guard rail issue. In response, Anthropic had no choice but to temporarily shut down all access to these two new models. Alright. So that's what happened. Almost immediately, the Internet exploded with most of its criticism focused on the, typically haphazard and inscrutable manner in which the Trump administration, as it usually does, acted in this case. Here's a headline from The Economist that I think captures this mood well. It reads, Donald Trump's blocking of anthropic is capricious and chaotic. America's closest allies are shell shocked. Dean Ball, who previously served as a senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence, put it this way on x. Make no mistake, post mythos, The United States has a licensing regime for AI. It's just informal with no consistent rules or firm boundaries on state power or public transparency. Even Gary Marcus, who is no fan of anthropic, was was uneasy, by the way, this all went down, saying on x, whatever you may think of Dario or Anthropic, Friday's decision and the impetuousness and arbitrariness of it was a terrible mistake that has left a stain that will last. But this is not a political show. So if we put the politics of the situation aside, there are some key deeper questions that lurk. For example, are these new models actually national security concerns? And two, in the hands of a more competent administration, is something like this more hands on regulatory approach actually warranted? Well, it's Thursday, which means it's time for an AI …