We all know the story by now. Last Friday on 12 June the Commerce Department issued an export control directive on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security, and both models were pulled from every customer the same evening.

Two days later a lobby group at freefable.org asked the government to lift it. Their letter argues that these models are nothing special. That’s essentially what I’ve been saying on this blog since the start, so you’d think I’d be excited to see the lobbyists bring the industry to where I’ve always been.

The problem is, nine weeks earlier I saw many of the same people argue the exact opposite, in writing, at length, and for money.

That’s not right.

Who You Gonna’ Call?

In April the Cloud Security Alliance published The AI Vulnerability Storm: Building a Mythos-ready Security Program, led by Knostic CEO Gadi Evron with Rich Mogull of CSA and Rob T. Lee of SANS. It warned security leaders their ground had moved suddenly and they needed to panic. It named an entire era after one single Anthropic model. It sold readiness, in person, with events booked through June.

In June the Free Fable letter told Secretary Lutnick the same capability is nothing more than commodity, replicable on GPT-5.5, Opus, Sonnet, and Kimi 2.7. Basically anything. And that the research that triggered this new ban was defensive all along.

Four Horsemen of AI-pocalypse

Looking at the list, I see four people signed both. Gadi Evron, who led the April paper. Rich Mogull, who co-wrote it. Katie Moussouris and Joshua Saxe, who contributed to it. Two documents, two months, two opposite arguments, same four names on each.

Table Time

What Is Our Industry Doing?

Nothing about the capability changed between April and June. The model is the same model. The code-review behavior the letter now calls defensive is the same behavior the April paper filed under “AI-driven offense is the new baseline“. Being accurate should be the goal, not picking a side based on payoff. In April the threat was called large and in charge, because that sells a Mythos-ready program, sells SANS seats, sells the consulting that follows a board briefing.

Evron sells a posture product. He needs a monster to sell monster services.

In June the threat was completely drained, because a small threat defeats an export control that pulls the model out of vendors’ hands and freezes a market.

From large to small, depending on whatever helps sell, sell, sell.

Somebody Isn’t There

Notably, I was disappointed to see people sign on in April. I since have had CISOs admit in person that they were heavily pressured, and felt they had to sign the campaign, or even attend a conference. Vendors herding CISOs into a purchasing barrel is as bad as it sounds.

Look also at Jen Easterly, former director of CISA. Rob Joyce, former cyber chief at NSA. Chris Inglis, former National Cyber Director. Bruce Schneier. Rob T. Lee of SANS. All of them lent the April paper its gravity. I mention it because none of them, so far, have put their name to the June lobby letter. Signing it contradicts their April selves. So perhaps it’s notable that reputational capital still seems anchored to the initial FUD. I see only commercial capital personalities flipped and signed the new letter.

I know some will say that the April paper hedged, that it wasn’t really about one model and that the capability predated Mythos. True, but misleading. The paper mentioned one vendor and one vendor only repeatedly, page after page. So the advice to “prepare for a real and spreading capability” is defensible, except “do not export-control one vendor of it” goes back to the same sole vendor that the April report hammered on too.

And while such hedging and liability vagueness could cover a general threat of AI, it does not cover the very obvious recategorization going on. In April the capability was offense, the new baseline of attack. In June it was a defensive code check that should not count as offensive. The same people flipped 180 on capability claims, based on what? Export control?

I have written that the ban itself is incoherent, an export control on a Tier 1 interaction over a capability Anthropic files under Tier 2. Now, I’m writing that the letter answering it is incoherent as a reflection.

The lobby letter is proof the April campaign was wrong, but it doesn’t land as a mea culpa among those running both. If the letter is to be believed, its signatories can’t be. Two incoherences are being pointed at each other, as if the public would want a coin-operated flip-flop laundry to lead America’s security industry.

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, when asked the questions an attacker might ask, is a national security threat if it returns something an attacker could use. In the interest of saving America, the following should also have been shutdown by Friday night.

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.