"They screwed us": Personality clashes sent Anthropic's models offline

Simon Willison's Blog News

Summary

Anthropic's models Fable and Mythos were taken offline due to personality clashes between the company and the US government, following concerns over jailbreak vulnerabilities. The article explores the behind-the-scenes conflicts and the possibility of perfect jailbreak resistance.

No content available
Original Article
View Cached Full Text

Cached at: 06/15/26, 04:59 PM

# “They screwed us”: Personality clashes sent Anthropic’s models offline Source: [https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/15/axios-clashes-anthropics/](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/15/axios-clashes-anthropics/) 15th June 2026 \- Link Blog **["They screwed us": Personality clashes sent Anthropic's models offline](https://www.axios.com/2026/06/15/anthropic-white-house-fable-mythos)**\. Lots of "source familiar with the administration's thinking" and "source close to Anthropic" in this Axios piece, which is the best collection of behind\-the\-scenes gossip I've seen about the US government[export control Mythos/Fable story](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/13/us-government-directive-to-suspend-access/)so far\. Logan Graham \([I lead the Frontier Red Team at Anthropic](https://logangraham.xyz/)\), Dave Orr \(Head of Safeguards, previously a Director of Engineering at Google DeepMind\), and blog favorite[Nicholas Carlini](https://simonwillison.net/tags/nicholas-carlini/)are reported to be meeting with the Commerce Department today in D\.C\. Good luck to them\! \(I just noticed Logan was "Special Adviser to the Prime Minister" in the Boris Johnson era, covering AI, science, and technology policy \- so significant political experience\.\) This closing notes doesn't give me much optimism that we'll be getting Fable back any time soon: > **The bottom line**: One option is to make sure Anthropic's models can't be jailbroken — though perfect jailbreak resistance[may be](https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access)impossible\. Absent that, a source familiar with the administration's thinking said it may simply come down to an attitude fix where, instead of feeling dismissed, "everyone feels safe, secure and happy\." This made me wonder if Anthropic ever successfully addressed the class of attacks described in the[Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://llm-attacks.org/)paper from 2023\. It looks like their[Constitutional Classifiers](https://www.anthropic.com/research/next-generation-constitutional-classifiers)work \(that post is from January this year\) is relevant to that\. They continue to claim that no "universal jailbreak" has been found against Claude Mythos,[classifying the jailbreak](https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access)that triggered the US government response as "a potential narrow, non\-universal jailbreak"\.

Similar Articles

The US government’s Anthropic models ban was never about an AI jailbreak

TechCrunch AI

The US government issued an export control directive forcing Anthropic to pull its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models offline, citing national security concerns. Security researchers argue the alleged guardrail bypass does not justify such action and that the move harms US cyber defense.

Is the US government’s Anthropic ban accidentally helping the brand?

TechCrunch AI

The US government forced Anthropic to pull its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models over national security concerns after a jailbreak was found. This episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast explores whether the ban might inadvertently benefit Anthropic's brand and IPO prospects.