A new report from Semafor says the White House’s move to place export restrictions on Anthropic’s Mythos may have been influenced in part by concerns that a group tied to China had gained access to the model. If Chinese officials were in fact able to use Mythos 5 or Fable 5, the implications could be significant for national security.
One major concern would be the possibility of reverse engineering through distillation, a process in which a less advanced “student” model is trained on the outputs of a more capable AI in order to mimic its behavior. That kind of access could allow a rival government to reproduce some of the system’s capabilities without developing the model independently.
So far, however, the White House has not publicly confirmed the report. Trump adviser David Sacks also appeared to point in a different direction in a post on X, where he did not mention China. Instead, he highlighted reports that Fable and Mythos could be jailbroken, an allegation Anthropic has denied.
