Amazon Reportedly Alerted Trump White House to AI Security Flaw, Prompting Global Shutdown
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was among the tech executives who raised concerns this week with the Trump administration about security risks in Anthropic’s newest AI models, according to a U.S. report cited by Channel 12. The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon security researchers managed to make Fable 5 generate information that could help hackers carry out cyberattacks.
Instead of first approaching Anthropic, as is common in many vulnerability disclosures, Amazon went directly to the White House. After receiving the information, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to block access by foreign nationals, in the United States and abroad, to the two new models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
Anthropic responded by shutting access to the models worldwide in order to meet the requirements imposed on it. The company said the U.S. government told it about a way to bypass Fable 5’s protections, but described it as a limited weakness that exposed only minor issues and that other public models could also identify. Amazon did not confirm whether it had spoken with government officials about Anthropic’s models. A company spokesperson said that as a major cloud provider to the public and private sectors, governments sometimes consult it on security matters, but it does not discuss those conversations.
The episode is especially sensitive because Amazon and Anthropic are both competitors in AI models, a major cloud provider for Anthropic, and one of its investors. White House adviser David Sacks said the order was issued “reluctantly” after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei allegedly refused to fix the flaw or remove the model. He added that if Anthropic addresses the safety problem, the restrictions could be lifted and Fable 5 could return to broad distribution. The dispute comes amid ongoing tension between Anthropic and the Trump administration after the company refused to let the U.S. military use its models for internal surveillance or autonomous weapons, while administration officials also accused it of posing a risk to the government supply chain.
