Amazon CEO Jassy raised concerns before US shut down Anthropic’s AI models

Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. ↗ 0.40% CEO Andy Jassy held discussions with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other senior Trump administration officials this week about security vulnerabilities in Anthropic's most advanced AI models, conversations that directly preceded the Commerce Department's unprecedented export control directive issued on Friday, June 12, ordering Anthropic to suspend access to its Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 systems globally.

The revelation, first reported by The Information and confirmed by the Wall Street Journal, exposes a striking conflict: Amazon is simultaneously Anthropic's largest investor — with over $4 billion committed — its primary cloud infrastructure partner through AWS, and now the company whose lobbying triggered a government shutdown of Anthropic's flagship products.theinformation+1

The Directive and Its Fallout

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Friday placing both models under export controls, barring access for all foreign nationals inside and outside the United States, including Anthropic's own foreign-national employees. Anthropic said it received the directive at 5:21 p.m. ET and, unable to verify citizenship for all users on short notice, disabled both models for every customer worldwide.letsdatascience+3

"The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance," Anthropic stated. Access to the company's other models remains unaffected.facebook

The action represents the most aggressive U.S. government move to restrict access to a commercially deployed AI model. An administration official told Axios the restrictions may last "the next few weeks" while security concerns are evaluated.letsdatascience

Competing Narratives

At the center of the dispute is a claimed jailbreak of Fable 5 — reportedly demonstrated by researchers who used the model to extract information useful for cyberattacks. Anthropic has characterized it as a "potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak" involving previously known vulnerabilities, arguing that the model was merely prompted to read a specific codebase and identify software flaws.techcrunch

David Sacks, former White House AI advisor, said on Saturday that Amodei refused a government request to "fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model" after "a highly credible trusted partner" reported the vulnerability. Anthropic has disputed the scope of the concern, calling the directive a "misunderstanding" and saying it hopes to restore access "as soon as possible".wftv+1

A Tangled Web of Interests

The episode highlights the extraordinary entanglements in the AI industry. Amazon competes with Anthropic through its own Nova models while simultaneously serving as the company's cloud provider and largest backer. Cybersecurity expert Katie Moussouris, who reviewed the jailbreak report, called the government's response "a complete overreaction," while a Democratic House member termed the directive "attempted corporate murder".fourweekmba

Fable 5 launched publicly on June 9 as a version of the more powerful Mythos 5, which Anthropic had restricted since April to vetted cybersecurity defenders due to its ability to identify zero-day vulnerabilities. The broader Mythos model had already drawn alarm from federal officials, prompting Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to warn bank CEOs about its risks in April.sullcrom+3