Amazon's Jailbreak Whisper Made Washington Yank Anthropic's AI — And $TAO Pumped 24% 🧠

The Trump administration's move to cut foreign access to two of Anthropic's most powerful AI models was triggered by a call from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Jassy contacted senior government officials on Thursday after Amazon researchers discovered a way to prompt Anthropic's Fable 5 model into returning information that could be used for cyberattacks. The call, paired with warnings from at least five other firms, set off a scramble inside the White House to assess the threat and contact Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who reportedly pushed back on the administration's concerns and on requests to voluntarily pull the model.

David Sacks, co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, said on Saturday: "In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It's been very surprised that Anthropic hasn't wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue)." Sacks added, "The Admin's hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue," which would allow the export control to be lifted and Fable to return to general release. "The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible."

The episode culminated in a US directive late Friday that forced Anthropic to pull Fable 5 and Mythos 5 from public access. In a blog post on Friday, Anthropic said it believed the directive stemmed from a misunderstanding about the threat posed by a "non-universal jailbreak" described in an unnamed report. Anthropic Claude has an estimated 18,900 monthly active users, and the company said it is working to restore access. Amazon declined to confirm whether it raised the issue with government officials. "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," a spokesperson said. "When they occur, we don't share the details of these discussions."

The crackdown also underscored the US government's ability to swiftly cut off access to US-based AI models on demand, prompting a rally in decentralized AI tokens over Friday and Saturday. Bittensor's TAO, the native token of a decentralized AI protocol that some call "the Bitcoin of AI," rose 23.9% over 24 hours. Venice Token (VVV), the native utility and privacy coin of the decentralized, uncensored Venice AI platform founded by Erik Voorhees, climbed 16%, while Near Protocol, a blockchain project building infrastructure for a decentralized AI agent economy, added 6.2%.