Anthropic's own $13 billion investor helped get the White House to ban the world's most powerful AI model

A new report has shed light on the escalating situation between Anthropic, the US government, and the company's latest AI model, which was only available for 3 days before being forcibly taken offline by the Trump administration.

Anthropic released Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 on Tuesday, which are the company's first "Mythos-class" models, seemingly classified as bleeding-edge AI. These Mythos-class models are straight-jacketed versions of the Mythos Preview that Anthropic showcased in April, and announced was too dangerous to be released to the public due to its power to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Essentially, Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 are versions of Mythos Preview with safety rails designed to prevent the model from being used in nefarious ways, such as generating malicious code.

These models with the built-in safety rails were banned by the US government over national security concerns, as authorities stated they had learned the Mythos-class models had been jailbroken. Reports state that Amazon, along with five other companies, contacted the White House and raised potential security concerns about Anthropic's Mythos-class models; as a result, the White House issued an export ban preventing non-US nationals from using them. Since that task was beyond Anthropic's capabilities, the AI company disabled the models for everyone.

"Expanding on this success, today Amazon and Anthropic are deepening their collaboration with a commitment from Anthropic to spend more than $100 billion over the next ten years on AWS technologies. This encompasses current and future generations of Trainium (Amazon's custom silicon) and tens of millions of Graviton cores (Amazon's widely-adopted CPU chip) to provide superior price performance," reads an Amazon News press release from April, 2026

So, what do we take from this? A Wall Street Journal report claimed Amazon CEO Andy Jassy contacted US officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, after researchers at Amazon used a series of prompts to get Fable 5 to generate malicious code. What's surprising is that Amazon is an investor in Anthropic, specifically $13 billion invested so far, since Anthropic's models run on Amazon Web Services infrastructure.

Furthermore, Amazon has a contractual agreement with Anthropic that allows Amazon to consult with Anthropic management and raise concerns about significant business issues. So, Amazon, a major investor in Anthropic, stifled the release of Fable 5, which, if successful and driving more revenue, would have benefited both parties. These swift actions showcase the AI industry can be quite cut-throat, as you typically don't see business partners trying to squash the launch of their partner's best product.

"Anthropic will secure up to 5 gigawatts (GW) of capacity to train and power their advanced AI models, including significant Trainium3 capacity expected to come online this year. The collaboration also includes a meaningful expansion of international inference in Asia and Europe to better serve Claude's growing international customer base," adds the press release

Unless, of course, that business partner is making a competing product in that area, which Amazon is. In fact, Amazon has invested a similar amount in OpenAI, exceeding Anthropic's $13 billion by $2 billion, showing that AI companies are happy to invest in their competitors while simultaneously developing competing products.

Amazon's Nova models are direct competitors to Anthropic's Claude models, and when it comes to the banning of the Mythos-class models, Anthropic states that the cybersecurity concerns raised by the five companies that led to the ban were replicable on OpenAI's latest model and other edge models.