Nadene Goldfoot
Fareed Zakaria just told us this morning about an AI company that was given 90 minutes to get their product off the market. What power!!! Last Friday, the U.S. government did something extraordinary. It forced one of America’s leading artificial intelligence companies to withdraw its most advanced product from the market. Anthropic, the maker of the frontier AI model Mythos and its commercially available cousin Fable, was given little warning and, according to reports, roughly 90 minutes to comply.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) does not have a physical body; it is a set of computer algorithms. In the physical world, AI looks like everyday technology—such as computer servers, microchips, or a blank text box on your screen. Visually, it is often represented by circuit boards, glowing blue tech graphics, or shiny humanoid robots.
- Claude Mythos 5: An unrestricted version meant exclusively for cyber-security professionals, government entities, and trusted infrastructure providers (via the Anthropic Project Glasswing program) to proactively identify and patch critical software vulnerabilities.
- Claude Fable 5: The commercially available version offered to enterprise clients and general subscribers. It features built-in safety classifiers that prevent the AI from generating functional cyber-attacks or addressing sensitive biology and chemistry queries.
Doesn't a business who invents something unique, and even perhaps got the patent for it have rights?
Businesses and countries keep competitor inventions off the market by acquiring, suppressing, or legally protecting them. This anti-competitive behavior is primarily achieved using sleeping patents, patent thickets, or government invention secrecy acts.
It could be done most nicely and secretly. Get the inventor in their clutches, wine and dine them, treat them like a king and offer a great price to buy the patent-or give them the rights to ownership somehow. Evidently Trump was in a 90 minute hurry. Here's what happened with the AI invention:
The Trump administration issued this 90-minute ultimatum to the AI company Anthropic to take its advanced "Fable 5" and "Mythos 5" artificial intelligence models offline over national security and cybersecurity concerns.
The dramatic standoff—and Fareed Zakaria's subsequent critique—unfolded with these key specifics:
- The Catalyst: Security researchers at Amazon found a "jailbreak" that allowed users to bypass the AI's safety guardrails. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy directly contacted U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to alert the administration, leading to an immediate federal crackdown. Jassy is the son of Margery and Everett L. Jassy of Scarsdale, New York. Of Jewish Hungarian ancestry, his father was a senior partner in the corporate law firm Dewey Ballantine in New York City, Jassy joined Amazon as a marketing manager in 1997. Early in his Amazon career, he helped run the company's first marketing team and later its compact disc business. He subsequently served as Jeff Bezos's first technical adviser, or "shadow", a role in which he accompanied Bezos to meetings and discussed potential business opportunities with him.
- In 2003, he and Bezos came up with the idea to create the cloud computing platform that became known as Amazon Web Services (AWS), which launched in 2006. Jassy headed AWS and its original team of 57 people.
- In 2015, Jassy and Amazon executive James Hamilton helped lead Amazon's acquisition of Annapurna Labs, an Israeli semiconductor company whose technology became part of Amazon's effort to design its own data-center chips. In 2016, Jassy was promoted from senior vice president to chief executive officer of AWS.
- The Ultimatum: On Friday, the White House and Commerce Department gave Anthropic executives just 90 minutes to comply with orders to pull the models down.
- The Shutdown: Anthropic initially pushed back but ultimately complied by disabling global access to the models for all users.
- The Political & Media Reaction: The ad-hoc, hurried nature of the ban drew heavy criticism, notably from foreign policy and technology commentator Fareed Zakaria.
- In his Washington Post column, Zakaria argued that critical AI regulation cannot be governed by a "grudge" or arbitrary weekend bureaucratic fights.
- He stated: "In its 90-minute demand to Anthropic... America was telling partners around the world: If your economy becomes dependent on American AI infrastructure, Washington can arbitrarily, and without warning or explanation, use its on-off switch."
- Zakaria has instead advocated for establishing an independent regulatory body—an "AI Fed"—similar to the Federal Reserve to properly manage the industry.
- I'm wondering how many inventors have been bypassed by the USA interests and have gone to China, instead, to be bought and kept off the market because of competition. I suppose this has been happening even in the USA as well. That may just be classified as business, something very Democratic. Here the inventor thinks it will sell like hotcakes and reality is that no one will ever see it.
- Anthropic's new Mythos model has sparked significant concern regarding its fearsome AI power and the potential risks it poses to global security. Sounds like it's good security to get it off the market. It's too smart.
- However, Mythos can hurt other businesses by accelerating cyberattacks to "machine speed," autonomously exploiting hidden software vulnerabilities faster than human teams can patch them. This leaves businesses—especially those relying on older, unpatchable systems in industries like energy and finance—vulnerable to severe breaches, operational downtime, and massive data theft.
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