White House · Anthropic · Amazon · Mythos · China · U.S. · TechCrunch AI
From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn’t stop anyone
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Last Friday, citing unspecified national security concerns, the White House ordered Anthropic to restrict the export of its powerful AI models Fable and Mythos to anyone outside of the United States, as well as foreign nationals inside the country.
Key facts
- To stop the distribution of PGP, the U.S. Customs Service opened a criminal investigation against PGP’s creator Phil Zimmermann for allegedly violating arms export controls
- Last Friday, citing unspecified national security concerns, the White House ordered Anthropic to restrict the export of its powerful AI models Fable and Mythos to anyone outside of the United States
- The result was the same: the Commerce Department issued an export control directive, and Anthropic had to scramble to immediately limit access to its products, within roughly 90 minutes
- Later during the early 2010s, researchers began discovering Western-made spyware used against dissidents in the Middle East
Summary
The episode is the first real test of whether the U.S. government can use export controls to contain frontier AI the way it has tried, with uneven results, to contain encryption and spyware before it. Ever since Anthropic launched Mythos in April, the company has marketed it as some kind of Doomsday cyber machine that could wreak havoc on the internet if released too widely, which is why, before the ban, only around 150 vetted companies and government organizations had access to it at all. So what triggered the ban?