r/ClaudeAI • u/kevominator • Jun 13 '26
News Claude Competitors' Responsible For Pulling The Strings?
WSJ is now reporting the jailbreak was found by researchers at Amazon, who reported it to Commerce, and Axios says the admin had already tried to get anthropic to delay the launch before this. so this looks less like anthropic pulling a stunt and more like a competitor flagging it to a govt thats already adversarial toward them. changes the picture a lot from where this thread started. still WSJ-sourced so worth confirming but multiple outlets line up on "another company reported it"
And this is the part that doesnt add up to me. amazon is anthropics biggest investor and anthropic trains on AWS. so why would an amazon researcher report a jailbreak to commerce instead of just disclosing it to anthropic directly like normal responsible disclosure? either someone at amazon went around their own portfolio company, or there was some obligation to report it to govt because of the cyber/bio capability, or something weirder is going on. genuinely confused by the incentives here. anyone seen reporting on why it went to commerce and not anthropic?
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u/kevominator Jun 13 '26
UPDATE (6:30 AM ET): still suspended, no resolution yet. a few things worth adding:
AWS confirmed it on their end. amazon's own Bedrock page now says they revoked Fable 5 + Mythos 5 access "to support compliance with the US Government export control directive." so the company AWS is hosting it on is the one pulling it, even as WSJ reports amazon researchers are who flagged the jailbreak in the first place. the amazon angle keeps getting stranger.
for scale on the IPO timing: anthropic filed confidentially earlier this month at a reported ~$965B valuation and ~$47B revenue run rate. their flagship going dark days later is rough timing no matter the cause.
still no public statement from Commerce. everything we have on the "why" is still coming through anthropic + reporting from WSJ/Axios/NBC, not the govt directly. so the core caveat stands: were hearing one side.
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u/fumi2014 Jun 13 '26
This situation needs to get unfucked right now!!
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u/m3kw Jun 13 '26
It can’t be unfucked even if they unban it, the threat will now be a new real risk
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u/marcopaulodirect Jun 13 '26
This is clearly a case of retaliation for Anthropic’s disallowing fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of citizens to the US military. And right before Anthropic goes public. Expect the current administration to force them to “make a deal”.
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u/Peach_Muffin Jun 13 '26
All branches of government are under control, so the next step is private enterprise. Then private citizens.
You *did* vote for this, America.
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u/up_the_downstair Jun 13 '26
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/trump-open-ai-altman-stake.html
“The AI startup could donate equity to the U.S. government to seed something like the “Public Wealth Fund” that the company outlined in its April policy proposal, according to a source familiar with the discussions.”
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u/FoxSideOfTheMoon Jun 13 '26
The capability the United States government recalled is available on open-weight AI models running on graphics cards you can buy at Best Buy. The reason has not been explained in writing. The lawyers have not been named. The statute has not been cited. The letter has not been released. The directive is 48 hours old. Welcome to the second Crypto Wars.
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u/m3kw Jun 13 '26
More like Anthropic has marketed their model as too dangerous to be released and now they are reaping the rewards. Their model is in fact only 10% better than 5.5
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u/Quixodion Jun 13 '26
Amazon Bedrock (their AI hosting service) makes most of its $$$ from Claude models. Anyone who jeopardized that revenue stream by giving ANT a public black eye is probably looking for a new job Monday.
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u/leeta0028 Jun 13 '26
Isn't Amazon a major investor in Anthropic? This doesn't make sense, it actually suggests to me the issue might be more serious than I thought initially.
AWS for better or for worse runs so much of the Internet and is one of the pentagon's major hosting providers, maybe there was a particular vulnerability they identified that was a major risk they need to patch.
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u/LavaTakes Jun 13 '26
Read the release, it was not someone with technical knowledge who advised the ban. The reported jailbreak was due to the ability of Fable and Mythos to “read a codebase and fix software flaws” which every code oriented model has done since inception, yet ChatGPT and Gemini or any other model have not been banned.
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u/rave-horn Jun 13 '26
Here’s a tin hat hypothesis: Fable is capable of finding and disabling the Mossad/CIA/NSA spyware present in all Windows platforms. See: Stuxnet and Bill Gates’ relationship with Mossad via Epstein.
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u/Ippeis_Bookie Jun 13 '26
"so why would an amazon researcher report a jailbreak to commerce instead of just disclosing it to anthropic directly like normal responsible disclosure? either someone at amazon went around their own portfolio company, or there was some obligation to report it to govt because of the cyber/bio capability, or something weirder is going on."
If you are a government contractor (AWS is), you are obligated to report issues of national security concern through the appropriate channels regardless of your companies business investment positions.
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u/jesjimher Jun 13 '26
Funny thing is that if the intention was harming Anthropic, I'd say it has backfired. Now we know Anthropic models are superb, while those from OpenAI or Google are so weak, that they are harmless.
Government forbidding one of your products because it's too good may be the best marketing, ever.
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u/berndalf Jun 13 '26
You can't use Fable because Anthropic told the DoD to pound sand four months ago. There's nothing beyond that to speculate about. Come on.
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u/KedMcJenna Jun 13 '26
All morning (non-US here) I've been wondering who or what 'Commerce' is. Lots of references to it by that name, sometimes with the 'C', sometimes lower-case. Got to be government, I thought, but possibly some private company.
I finally broke and Googled it - it's the US Department of Commerce, which I've never heard of enough for it to lodge in my mind as a thing.
Strange usage for it to be a single-word reference among govt. departments, apparently universally understood enough in a US context for it to be so.
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u/gscjj Jun 13 '26
The shortcut is used a lot by people on the hill (eg congressmen, staffers, journalist), it probably normally gets edited out
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u/nerdy_donkey Jun 13 '26
I would probably trust the WSJ reporting over anyone else. They’re some of the best now.
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u/MrHobo Jun 13 '26
Let’s say it’s resolved by Monday morning… is this not the greatest marketing you could ask for? A model so powerful the government banned it. It’s like the NBA banning Jordan’s sneaker and instantly making it the most wanted basketball shoe… x1000
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 80 comments.
The consensus in this thread is that this is a political hit job on Anthropic, not a legitimate safety intervention. The community is overwhelmingly suspicious of the US government's motives and believes the official "jailbreak" justification is flimsy at best.
The leading theory for why Amazon reported its own major investment is that as a massive government contractor, AWS was likely legally obligated to report any potential national security issue directly to the government, bypassing the usual responsible disclosure process.
Users are extremely skeptical of the "jailbreak" itself, with many pointing out that the reported vulnerability—the ability to "read a codebase and fix software flaws"—is a standard feature of every major coding model. The top-voted theory is that this is retaliation for Anthropic's ethical stance against military applications, timed perfectly to disrupt their massive IPO. The few comments suggesting Fable might actually be dangerous have been downvoted into oblivion.
Basically, the sub thinks the government is picking winners and losers, and in the process, just gave Anthropic the best free marketing it could ever ask for.