Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy called Trump administration officials Thursday night to flag a jailbreak of Anthropic's Mythos 5 model, setting off a 24-hour White House scramble that ended in Friday's export order pulling Fable 5 and Mythos 5 worldwide, according to weekend reporting from Axios, Semafor and the Washington Examiner. Semafor separately reported that the order was driven in part by suspicions a China-linked group had accessed Mythos 5.
The new details fill in the chain behind Friday's takedown, first reported here over the weekend, and recast what looked like a sudden regulatory shock as a response to Amazon's alert and a cascade of senior-official meetings.
The 24-hour timeline
Amazon researchers used a multistage prompt sequence to bypass Fable 5's guardrails and reach the underlying Mythos 5 model, Katie Moussouris, chief executive of Luta Security, told the Washington Examiner after reviewing Anthropic's report on the technique. Jassy took the findings to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other officials, and Friday meetings at the White House drew in chief of staff Susie Wiles, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, AI czar David Sacks and President Trump, per the Washington Examiner and Semafor.
At 1 p.m. Eastern on Friday, Anthropic received a call instructing it to roll back the releases over a "national security threat," with no further details, an Anthropic source told Axios. The company was given roughly 90 minutes to comply before a licensing regime would be imposed. Lutnick's formal directive to CEO Dario Amodei landed at 5:21 p.m., CNBC and Semafor reported, restricting access to U.S. nationals only. Rather than filter by citizenship overnight, Anthropic disabled both models for every customer by about 10 p.m., per Axios.
The China angle
A person familiar with the matter told Semafor the White House moved "partly over suspicions that a China-linked group had accessed" Mythos 5, raising the prospect that Beijing could reverse-engineer the model through distillation. Anthropic disputed the framing, telling Semafor the White House did not raise Chinese access during the discussions and that the company prohibits access from within China.
Sacks said on X that Amodei refused an administration request to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy Fable 5 before the order went out. "In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety," Sacks wrote, in posts quoted by Semafor and the Washington Examiner. An Amazon spokesman did not confirm the jailbreak testing but told the Examiner that "it's not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks."
The counterpoint
The sharpest pushback runs through the Washington Examiner's own reporting. Moussouris, a former U.S. adviser on export controls, called the order a "regulatory overreaction" and said Amazon tested its technique only on known CVEs and on code with deliberately inserted flaws. "No new vulnerabilities in real code were discussed in this paper," she told the Examiner, arguing defenders need this capability to keep pace with attackers. The competitive subtext is worth noting: Amazon operates Bedrock, a competing model marketplace, and stands to benefit from Fable's absence.
Anthropic, which filed to go public earlier this month, said it is complying with the directive while disputing the reasoning, and told customers it is "working to restore access as soon as possible." No timetable has been set.