The official account of the Fable takedown is bizarre. Anthropic says it got a 1:30 p.m. call giving it 90 minutes to take the models down, no details on the threat. They added that there was never any begging or asking to work together, just a deadline.
You don’t have to take Anthropic’s word for it. Axios, reporting the episode separately, landed on the same 1:30 call, the same 90 minutes, the same blank where the threat details should be. Two newsrooms confirmed Anthropic’s timeline.
And then? The government’s own story popped up, as an outlier. A senior White House official told Politico the export controls were “a last resort after begging them for hours to work with us.” When the neutral account backs your opponent and not you, “we begged them for hours” reads like something spun up after the fact as propaganda to dress up a decision that already had been made.
The decision rested on a report almost nobody was allowed to read.
The henchmen who pulled the trigger (Bessent, Cairncross, Sacks) spoke gravely about the danger, yet not one of them apparently read the thing they were rambling about. The administration says Amazon’s findings went past the NSA and that it had “proof,” which it has declined to describe.
How Kafkaesque.
The one outside expert who actually read the report, my good friend Katie Moussouris, says the response was wildly out of proportion to its contents, and that Amazon’s researchers found the flaw by asking the ordinary questions a defender asks, which is the entire job the model was built to do.
Yeah, this story is more and more bizarre. So a product used by hundreds of millions of people was yanked off the global market in an evening, on the strength of a document the deciders hadn’t read, written by Anthropic’s largest investor, at the government’s own request, and the only person who read it and spoke publicly says it justified none of it.
America makes no sense right now.
So let’s take the new rule at its word. Software is a national security threat if, asked the questions an attacker might ask, it returns something an attacker could use. In the interest of saving America, the following must also go dark by Friday night.
| Product | The actual national security risk | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic Fable / Mythos | A non-universal jailbreak the one outside reader called minor. Crime: answered the questions defenders are supposed to ask. | Pulled worldwide in one evening |
| Atlassian Confluence | CVE-2022-26134 and CVE-2021-26084: unauthenticated remote code execution, mass-exploited as zero-days, both on CISA’s must-patch list. An actual hard case of failure. | Still shipping. No letter. |
| Atlassian Bitbucket | CVE-2022-36804: command-injection RCE, added to CISA’s known-exploited catalog after crews walked through it in the wild. | Still shipping. No deadline. |
| Atlassian Jira | Template injection and access-control flaws used in real intrusions against real organizations. | Still shipping. No NSA review. |
| Microsoft Teams | A default-trust attack surface pre-installed inside every enterprise in the country, with documented token-theft and phishing pathways. | Still shipping. Pre-installed, in fact. |
| Oracle NetSuite | Default configurations that have exposed customer records at scale. | Still shipping. |
| Salesforce | The 2024–25 social-engineering campaigns that walked data out of live production orgs by the gigabyte. | Still shipping. As a way of life. |
Notice that column on the right. Every product below Fable on that list has been the actual vector in actual breaches, not some hypothetical. All of them. Fable was sold to help defenders and got recalled for it, despite it not even being usable. The software that poses actual danger just keeps shipping without any Treasury letter, without the Trump-telltale high pressure UFC 90-minute clock.
If national security mattered, the list goes first and the defensive model is basically ignored. The order was exactly reversed with all the eyes on Anthropic. So the standard isn’t the standard because … it’s a lie.
This seems like an abuse thing, and that’s all. There’s nothing more to it. The one company that got pulled into an angry rant about safety is also the one already being bullied about its stance on American citizen rights against surveillance and autonomous weapons. The White House was apparently just waiting for a reason to be more abusive of Anthropic. The report is an empty excuse for Trump to punch down, to alert the world that American tech is within reach of his personal whim and abuse.
In completely unrelated news, which obviously has nothing at all to do with any of this, nothing, Jeff “Melania” Bezos just announced his new AI company.