The White House restricted Anthropic's Mythos model after a group linked to China reportedly accessed it, according to Semafor. Unauthorized access to Mythos 5 or Fable 5 would be a direct national security problem. The deeper threat: distillation, a technique where a weaker "student" model trains on a more capable one to replicate its behavior, meaning a copy could exist without anyone stealing the weights.
The White House has not confirmed the China link. Trump advisor David Sacks posted on X about the restrictions without mentioning China at all, pointing to a different rationale entirely. That gap between the official line and the reported reason is the story.
Read the Semafor report and the Sacks post together. The disconnect between what the administration is saying publicly and what reportedly triggered the decision tells you something about how AI export policy is actually being made right now.
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