Amazon and five other companies reportedly triggered the government crackdown on Anthropic’s Fable model

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and executives from other tech companies reportedly warned the Trump administration about security vulnerabilities in Anthropic’s Fable model, even though Amazon is one of Anthropic’s largest investors. Within hours, the White House forced the model offline through an export control order.

On Thursday evening, Amazon handed the government a report claiming to show how parts of the Fable model can be unlocked through jailbreaking. What makes this remarkable: Amazon is one of Anthropic’s biggest investors. Anthropic trains and runs its models on Amazon’s own AI chips, among other infrastructure. A major investor effectively turning in its own portfolio company to the government is, to put it mildly, unusual.Ad “As a leading cloud provider that serves a large number of private and public sector customers, it’s not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks,” an Amazon spokesperson told Axios.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1 At least five other companies raised the alarm, and the government moved within hours According to Axios, at least five other companies besides Amazon reached out to senior government officials on Thursday evening and Friday morning. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross responded by calling a meeting with top White House officials. For hours, the government tried to convince Anthropic to pull the model voluntarily. Anthropic refused. The White House didn’t send the official export control order until 5:20 p.m. ET, giving the company just 90 minutes to comply. By 10:00 p.m., Anthropic had shut the model down.Ad Cybersecurity expert Katie Moussouris, who reviewed the Amazon report at Anthropic’s request, called the government’s response wildly disproportionate. What Amazon flagged was just “Defense Oriented Prompting” (DOP), she said, a technique used by defenders rather than attackers, not a jailbreak. “If national security is the goal, this is an own goal against us,” she wrote on LinkedIn. A source told Axios the escalation may have had less to do with the actual security risk than with the broader relationship between Anthropic and the U.S. government. Officials were bothered by what they saw as a “lack of seriousness” in how Anthropic handled the Fable release.