Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warned White House about Claude Fable 5 jailbreak, triggering shutdown
New reporting from the Wall Street Journal and Fortune revealed a previously undisclosed detail: the immediate trigger for the US Department of Commerce June 12 export control order against Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was a warning delivered to the White House by Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon.
The sequence of events
- Amazon found a jailbreak in its internal testing of Claude Fable 5, similar to the technique publicly published by Pliny the Liberator on June 10
- Jassy communicated the findings to members of the US administration
- The White House triggered the Commerce Department, which sent a letter to Anthropic on Friday, June 12, giving the company 90 minutes to restrict access
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei participated in several calls with senior administration officials
The complex Amazon-Anthropic relationship
The revelation is particularly striking because Amazon is Anthropic largest individual investor — approximately $8 billion across two tranches. Anthropic also committed to spending over $100 billion on AWS infrastructure starting April 2026.
Yet it was Amazon CEO who delivered the warning that led to the shutdown of Anthropic most powerful models. For Amazon, protecting its government relationships and national security posture took priority over the Anthropic investment relationship.
Anthropic argument
Sources close to Anthropic say the company was given 90 minutes to implement restrictions without prior communication of a specific national security threat. Anthropic argues the identified vulnerability is narrow and non-universal — not a full jailbreak of the model safety system.
There are also suspicions, per Semafor, that a group with ties to China may have obtained access to the Mythos model, though it was not revealed how or which organization was targeted.