Anthropic to meet White House over AI tool suspension

Reuters

Bosses at the artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic are set to meet senior White House officials amid fresh national security concerns over the company’s latest release.

The meeting is set to take place on Monday in Washington DC between executives at Anthropic and the US Department of Commerce, a government department led by Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The firm made the decision after the US government prohibited Anthropic from allowing any foreign national access to the technology.

The AI tool at issue is named Fable 5 or Mythos 5. Fable 5 is a version of the tool with extra safeguards made available to the public, while Mythos 5 has different controls and is only available to a select group of organisations.

Both represent a new version of Claude Mythos, a new Anthropic AI model that caused a stir when the company in April initially gave preview and testing access to a relatively small number of organizations, including departments within the US government.

Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei is expected at the meeting with secretary Lutnick, a source said.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment. Representatives of Commerce and Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

By making a version of Mythos available to the public, Anthropic said last week that doing so “comes with risks”.

“Fable’s capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available”, it added.

Within days of the release, the US government said it had “become aware” of a potential “jailbreak,” or an opening for someone to make an AI tool do something that it was not intended or designed to do.

Anthropic said on Friday that it had only received “verbal evidence” of the purported jailbreak vulnerability.

The split between Anthropic and the government is the latest this year, which has seen Anthropic sue the US Department of Defense over a fight about how its models can be used.

However, tensions appeared to be on the wane a few weeks ago as the company met senior White House officials in what was described as a “productive” meeting.

The Monday meeting with Department for Commerce is expected to include more documentation of the alleged issue, according to one of the people familiar.

It is unclear, however, if after the meeting Anthropic will be able to make Fable 5 and Mythos 5 accessible again.