<
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/16/apparently-the-real-reason-anthropics-models-are-offline-a-six-year-old-trump-grudge/>
"Yesterday we wrote about the Trump administration forcing Anthropic to shut
down Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The short version: dumb. Today, Axios got White
House officials on the record, and it turns out the real reason is even dumber
than we thought. In that original piece, we had pointed out that cybersecurity
expert Katie Moussouris had been able to review the jailbreak and found that it
was actually a useful way for cybersecurity defenders to fix and patch
cybersecurity flaws, rather than a tool to be weaponized.
As we noted in that piece, it’s entirely possible that there was some real
danger involved in the jailbreak, but we doubted that the administration would
be honest about it. And it sounds like we were right to be suspicious. Axios
got White House officials on record with the actual reason: Anthropic had asked
Moussouris to review the jailbreak, and the administration decided she was a
“radical Democrat.” That’s it. That’s the reason the models are offline.
* “We never wanted this to happen. Our number one priority is innovation but
our hands were tied,” the White House official said.
* The optics added fuel to the fire. Anthropic came out with a blog post
dismissing the Amazon report. Then the company enlisted a cybersecurity
expert viewed by the administration as a “radical Democrat,” who was then
celebrated by Chris Krebs, who Trump just fired.
First off, Krebs wasn’t “just fired.” Krebs was fired (somewhat famously) all
the way back in 2020, and not because he’s some sort of “radical Democrat,” but
because he pointed out that the 2020 election was shown to have been quite
secure. And since that ruined Trump’s big lie that he had really won the
election, he had to fire Krebs (whom he had hired in the first place).
So… it appears that the Trump admin shut down the most advanced versions of
Anthropic’s AI tools not because they posed a serious risk… but because
Anthropic asked someone to review the supposed threat, and that person got a
shout-out from someone Trump hates for once telling the truth about election
cybersecurity.
As promised, this story just keeps getting stupider."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
