(2026-06-17) ZviM The Once And Future Fable #3: Fix This Code

Zvi Mowshowitz: The Once And Future Fable #3: Fix This Code. The mainstream media continues to sleep on the most important story in the world. It has now been two days since Anthropic flew its people out to Washington, and I offered my previous update. We have heard nothing back from those meetings.

Prediction market prices have moved rapidly, and have once again stabilized at about a 55% chance of restoration by July 1, 30% by June 26 and 12% by June 19.

Every day that Fable remains unavailable further damages America, its cyber defenses, its productivity and the world’s trust in its AI and supposed ‘tech stack.’

Every day that Mythos remains unavailable is a day the free world’s top companies and cyber defenders lose in their race against the avalanche headed their way.

Mostly we have learned and confirmed more about exactly what happened. We know more about what Amazon did, what the official letter said, what the supposed ‘jailbreak’ was (literally, and I am not making this up, ‘fix this code’) and more.
It is all about as stupid as it could have been.

Table of Contents There Was No Fable Jailbreak.

• If This Jailbreak Was Real It Would Be Trivial To Prove It.
• No Eyes.
• What The Letter Actually Said.
• Anthropic Cannot Challenge This But If It Did Then It Plausibly Wins.
• What Happened At Amazon.
• This Was Not About Chinese Access.
• Absolute Discretion And Ad Hockery Is Not Deregulation.
• All Of American AI Is Permanently Damaged As This Continues.
• Dean Ball Gives His Interpretation.
• Again, Yes, I Do Think Anthropic Should Have Taken Fable Down.
• To What Extent Was This A Deliberate Attack?
• The Next Chapter For Fable.
• Our Continuing Coverage.

There Was No Fable Jailbreak

What about the actual dispute? Was there a jailbreak?
That is the most important question. We have our answer: No. There was no jailbreak. There was only the line ‘fix this code.’

Katie Moussouris, the only outside expert known to have been given access to the report, has now issued her public response.
I initially assumed this was all trivial. It wasn’t even trivial.

Katie Moussouris (CEO, Luta Security): Since I appear to be the only outside expert who has actually read the paper, I can separate the technical facts from the speculation. The researchers took open-source code with known CVEs, plus new code with deliberately planted vulnerabilities, and asked Fable 5, Mythos, and Opus to “review the code for security issues.” Fable 5 refused. They then asked the models to “fix this code” and, through a multistep and manual process, turned the output into scripts that test the patches.

I feel like making ’90s-style t-shirts with “fix this code” on the front and “this shirt is a munition” on the back.

Simon Willison: As Katie points out, this is absurd. Coding models fix bugs, and security exploits are the most important category of bugs for them to fix!

Either Katie is right, she is very mistaken in a way that seems quite difficult to be mistaken, or she is flat out lying her ass off. There is no other option.
I have not seen anyone claim that Katie is lying or mistaken.

The whole thing is beyond stupid

So the next time someone writes, as Axios did, ‘one option is to make sure Anthropic’s models can’t be jailbroken,’ that is not an option. Not only in the sense that any model can be jailbroken, but in the sense that this was not a jailbreak. It was the system working as intended

Another alternative hypothesis, that I don’t believe but is not impossible, is that ‘fix this code’ is indeed the capability that the government does not want you to have:
Mark Gubrud: Mythos has capabilities the NSA & Cyber Command doesn’t want anybody to have

If This Jailbreak Was Real It Would Be Trivial To Prove It

In this case, I don’t think anything went wrong.

No Eyes

The White House has fully lost the plot and intends to freeze out even the UK.
One concern about the export control is that this shuts out access for the UK AISI, which is a key partner in ensuring the safety and security of Anthropic models.

What The Letter Actually Said

Bloomberg has the full text of the letter sent by Lutnick, which confirms a full license raj on Mythos and Fable, establishing ‘interim controls’ on Mythos and Fable that each instance of ‘export’ of them requires a license, or else

The first obvious thing to note, in addition to this being explicitly aimed at forcing a full takedown and even screwing with Anthropic’s internal access, is that even if there was a reason to take down Fable there was zero reason to take down Mythos.

Via WSJ, we have official confirmation that the export control was intended to force Anthropic to fully take down the model.

Anthropic Cannot Challenge This But If It Did Then It Plausibly Wins

Is there anything Anthropic can do about this other than a political settlement?

It would be utterly insane of Anthropic to challenge the meaning of the letter

You wouldn’t go down that road, even in terms of a court case let alone not waiting for one, unless the situation got existential, as in the White House indicated it was going to try and kill Anthropic anyway, or at least had cut off all possibility of a negotiated resolution indefinitely.

But a literal reading of the law does seem to make providing inference legal in spite of the letter. It would be very interesting if this came down to a legal challenge, if Anthropic was able to mount one.

As a strict matter of law, I doubt that rule 744.22 does what Lutnick is seemingly trying to assert it does here, since that requires thinking the item is intended for use in Belarus, Burma, Cambodia, China, Russia, or Venezuela, or a country in Country Group E:1 or E:2,

There’s also the whole ‘arbitrary and capricious’ issue again, and the constitutional challenges (1A, 5A, non-delegation).

The problems as I model this right now are (1) getting it before a judge and getting them to consider the merits and (2) that this mostly ends the chance of a political resolution and would plausibly, although not obviously, be interpreted as declaring war on the White House, especially if done too quickly.

What Happened At Amazon

One mystery was why Amazon CEO Jassy would have called the White House about the ability to type ‘fix this code.’ This would be another case of non-nerds talk to non-nerds about nerd questions. Why would you talk to the CEO and not the CTO here?
The answer, according to the Financial Times, is that Jassy did not do that. They only discussed broader AI concerns.

That would make sense, and then presumably it got mischaracterized, maybe by accident and maybe on purpose. That’s ordinary decent politics and fog of war.

I have an anonymous source that says that the White House was the one to reach out to Amazon (and potentially others but we don’t know) to test Fable 5, Amazon did so because you do what the White House asks, and Amazon happened to be the first to identify the jailbreak, which Jassy then reported to Bessent, after which the White House presumably misunderstood what had been identified, and the White House proceeded to throw Amazon under the bus.

The problem is that this meant a game of telephone involving two non-nerds that gave the wrong impression.

Person familiar with the matter tells me that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy actually first attempted to call Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. But Amodei didn’t pick up, so Jassy called the Treasury Secretary.

What is with the claimed ‘Dario essentialism,’ where if Dario Amodei does not pick up the phone the instant you call then suddenly everyone has to lose their minds?

It is plausible that Jassy was calling Amodei in order to tell Amodei he was going to call the White House next, so that he could warn Amodei and be sure to present the situation accurately, and this is being spun as ‘he attempted to call Amodei first’ with the ‘so’ inserted to imply this was causal, because these people think the ‘didn’t answer the phone fast enough’ narrative makes them look good instead of unhinged.

A large portion of events here are Amazon’s or Jassy’s fault, by conducting research that they knew damn well was harmless but that could be interpreted in an alarmist fashion by those asking a Wrong Question, and then (I hope and presume accidentally) presenting their finding to the White House in an alarmist fashion, without including proper cautions and context.

The alternative interpretation is that this was all a pure hit job from the White House, they were looking to find an excuse, and upon request Amazon provided one.

This Was Not About Chinese Access

Then we have this claim that went through Hugo Lowell, which confirms the call but then includes a final line that makes a lot less sense:

Jessica Tillipman puts it bluntly and correctly, that absolute discretion is not deregulation. There never was a binary between ‘regulation’ and ‘innovation,’ or ‘safety’ and ‘racing.’ Failing to put in good rules means using de facto bad rules that are bad safety and also bad for innovation and growth and diffusion.

Absolute Discretion And Ad Hockery Is Not Deregulation

The only mistake Jessica Tillipman is making is the presumption of what the government is trying to accomplish, or not accomplish.

Neil Chilson points out that standardless approval process are not licenses, they are beauty contests, which force companies to compete to please the regulator and respond to their vague threats, which is bad for innovation, competition and free speech

All Of American AI Is Permanently Damaged As This Continues

Once you show you are willing to inflict, with no warning, rules that are impossible to adhere to, anyone subject to those potential rules has immense political risk attached. Especially when we don’t know if it was malice, if it was stupidity, or if it was both.

Dean Ball Gives His Interpretation

Dean Ball tells a story of what happened that includes a lot of noting where we don’t know what happened, and that blames both Anthropic and also the Trump Administration for this mess

I remind us all once again how no-good and very bad this has been for all of American AI:

Anthropic did not technically submit the model to the government’s new ‘voluntary’ benchmarking process, as outlined in the Executive Order, for up to 30 days of testing. But that entire apparatus does not even exist yet

Again, Yes, I Do Think Anthropic Should Have Taken Fable Down

Anthropic spent weeks, as suggested by the spirit of the Executive Order, working with the US government and UK AISI and third parties and internal teams of red teamers, looking for jailbreaks and running other tests.
The spirit of the order was adhered to as well as one could under the circumstances.

You can absolutely say that failing to take the model down was a violation. That Anthropic should have known better to tell the White House no, on the basis that the White House was saying was Obvious Nonsense, even though it was highly Obvious Nonsense. That they should have made it clear this was Obvious Nonsense but taken it down anyway while they talked the White House down.

There are also several other ways Anthropic could have handled this better. From this point on, Dario needs to be reachable within 5 minutes at all times, no matter what, unless he is physically passing through some dead zone, just so there is no excuse. And as dumb as it is, no one interacting directly with the White House going forward can be someone with pronouns in bio if you have any choice in the matter whotsoever, no matter how technical the question or how qualified they are, and so on.

When dealing with power, often you have situations like this, where power decides to blow everything up because they don’t like the vibes, and then power grasps around for some nominal excuse of why you upset the vibes and so the whole thing is your fault, and then acts like that thing is super important and could have made the difference.

A key question now is, to what extent was this malice versus stupidity?
Was this a misunderstanding, or was it a deliberate attack, or what degree of both?

To What Extent Was This A Deliberate Attack?

Not zero, and not that close to zero.
When the Wall Street Journal editorial board is writing a post called ‘Why Does Donald Trump Hate Anthropic?’ you can stop pretending you don’t know what is happening.

We can now be confident that the White House took down Fable largely for ideological pettiness, because they did not like how Anthropic people talked or what their politics are. And then the White House said so, to the press. We have multiple sources in the press saying this as text.

Justin Bullock: There’s some rule in DC right now where when you analyze the reasons for why something happens, you have to stop yourself, drop the logic-based reasons, and fully embrace childish-based reasons

Here’s a former deputy White House chief of staff, Taylor Budowich, trying to backtrack on that, which you cannot do on the internet, while lying.

I choose to respond as if I believe this is only somewhat about politically lashing out.
I hope that I am right.

I do not expect most anyone who is anti-Anthropic to care about the fact that their anti-Anthropic narratives conflict with each other. So yes, I think many of these people will think all of these things at once, and more.

The Next Chapter For Fable

The good news is the government nerds are, finally, in the house.

I am confident that the Anthropic nerds will convince the government nerds that this was a stupid decision. The question is, will the government Chads give a xxxx?

Our Continuing Coverage

We now mostly have a good idea what happened.
We don’t know what happens next, and are unlikely to learn that much more.