Andy Jassy reportedly alerted U.S. officials to a jailbreak in Anthropic's Claude Fable 5, triggering export controls that cut off global access to two models.
Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy may have been the catalyst for a U.S. government crackdown on two Anthropic artificial intelligence models, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal cited by TechCrunch. [1]
Jassy reportedly told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other government officials that Amazon researchers had used Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 model to obtain information that could be used in cyberattacks. [1] The government subsequently imposed an export control ban on both the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, cutting off worldwide access to them. [1]
Amazon, which is a major investor in Anthropic, did not directly confirm the substance of those conversations. An Amazon spokesperson said the company does not “share the details of those discussions,” while acknowledging it is “not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks.” [1] The spokesperson also noted that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, has itself been affected by the model cutoff. [1]
The Information and Reuters separately reported that Amazon had communicated concerns about the security of Anthropic’s models, corroborating the broad outline of the Journal’s account. [1]
David Sacks, who served as the Trump administration’s AI policy coordinator and now co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, offered a more pointed version of events. [1] Sacks said that “a highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG […] came forward with a jailbreak” — referring to a technique used to bypass a model’s safety guardrails. [1] Sacks further claimed that the administration asked Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei “to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model” and that “Dario refused.” [1]
Anthropic disputed the severity of the underlying concern, stating in a blog post that the capabilities apparently driving the government’s action are already available in other publicly accessible models. [1]
The episode highlights a tension that developers and enterprise buyers building on third-party AI models may increasingly face: a model that is available one day can be subject to access restrictions the next, based on government security determinations that may not be fully disclosed publicly. AWS’s own service disruption from the cutoff underscores that even major cloud providers are not insulated from such actions. [1]
Sources
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