“The Once And Future Fable #2” by Zvi

On Friday evening the United States Government has forced Anthropic to take down all access to Fable and Mythos.

It's been a rough weekend.

Dean W. Ball: One thing about AI regulation being haphazardly imposed on just-released, highly performant models is that in a very real sense, the government just made my world *dumber.* In some impressionistic sense I almost always think this is true of government, but here it is literal.

More details have come to light. There remains some fog of war, but we now have a rather good idea why Claude Fable and Mythos were, deeply stupidly, taken down.

1. A narrow jailbreak was discovered, of the type Anthropic warned in advance obviously existed. All demonstrated outputs are things GPT-5.5 can not only produce, but produce without any sort of jailbreak or bypass.
2. The White House demanded Anthropic take down Fable to ‘fix’ the situation, and did not listen when Dario tried to explain that there was no situation to fix.
3. When Anthropic did not do so, the White House hit them with an export restriction that they knew would force Fable and Mythos down for everyone.

[...]

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Outline:

(05:17) What Happened When: The Bottom Line

(06:54) Amazon Calls The White House

(08:36) The Government Panics

(14:20) The Stupider Version

(17:05) There Was No Wellness Retreat

(18:56) Make Your Threats Explicit

(20:05) Was China Accessing Mythos?

(21:05) Should Anthropic Still Have Taken Fable Offline When Asked?

(23:50) Yes, This Was A Takedown Order For Fable

(24:48) We Are Not Saying The DoW Fight Is Related And Yet

(25:48) The Nihilists

(27:28) Mostly Harmless

(28:14) Everyone Means Everyone

(31:09) This Could Be The Good Scenario And Mostly A Misunderstanding

(33:28) The Next Step

(33:47) The Worst Licensing Regime Is Fully Ad-Hoc

(37:07) We Are Showing We Are Unreliable Partners

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First published:
June 15th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3fagcqrauaJs32mZZ/the-once-and-future-fable-2

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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