Anthropic had 90 minutes to take down Fable after Trump admin demand

Maria Curi

Illustration of a person at a laptop with a cord featuring a lit fuse — Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

The Trump administration gave Anthropic 90 minutes on Friday to pull down its most powerful models before imposing a licensing regime on the company, according to an Anthropic source.

Why it matters: It illustrates the mad dash within the government to react to warnings from Amazon and others about the models' capabilities.

Catch up quick: At 1 p.m. ET on Friday, Anthropic received a call from the government instructing them to roll back the release of the Mythos and Fable models due to a "national security threat," but with no further details, the Anthropic source said.

The government and Anthropic already had worked on pre-release testing of Fable, and the company had received explicit approval to deploy.
"We immediately sought to understand the specific nature of the threat so we could remediate it," the source said, but the government held firm on the demand.
By 5:30 PM ET Anthropic received a letter from the Commerce Department imposing controls on where the models could be used and by whom.
The company immediately began the process of de-deploying the models.

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Anthropic had 90 minutes to take down Fable after Trump admin demand

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