Monday, 15th June 2026
[...] Instead, I picture a specific person and I just write for them. Often this person is "me, but 3 years ago" or a good friend.
— Julia Evans, write for 1 person
“They screwed us”: Personality clashes sent Anthropic’s models offline. Lots of "source familiar with the administration's thinking" and "source close to Anthropic" in this Axios piece, which is the best collection of behind-the-scenes gossip I've seen about the US government export control Mythos/Fable story so far.
Logan Graham (I lead the Frontier Red Team at Anthropic), Dave Orr (Head of Safeguards, previously a Director of Engineering at Google DeepMind), and blog favorite Nicholas Carlini are reported to be meeting with the Commerce Department today in D.C. Good luck to them!
(I just noticed Logan was "Special Adviser to the Prime Minister" in the Boris Johnson era, covering AI, science, and technology policy - so significant political experience.)
This closing notes doesn't give me much optimism that we'll be getting Fable back any time soon:
The bottom line: One option is to make sure Anthropic's models can't be jailbroken — though perfect jailbreak resistance may be impossible.
Absent that, a source familiar with the administration's thinking said it may simply come down to an attitude fix where, instead of feeling dismissed, "everyone feels safe, secure and happy."
This made me wonder if Anthropic ever successfully addressed the class of attacks described in the Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models paper from 2023.
It looks like their Constitutional Classifiers work (that post is from January this year) is relevant to that. They continue to claim that no "universal jailbreak" has been found against Claude Mythos, classifying the jailbreak that triggered the US government response as "a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak".
- New tool,
execute_write_sql, which requests user approval and then writes to a database - taking user permissions into account. #27
I added a mechanism for asking user approval in datasette agent 0.2a0. The new execute_write_sql tool can now prompt the user for all kinds of useful operations. Here's an example where I add some pelican sightings to my pelican_sightings table:
The new version also enhances the datasette agent chat terminal mode to support approvals, and adds several new options including --unsafe mode for auto-approving them:
datasette agent chatcan execute tools that require user approval. #30- Three new options for
datasette agent chat---rootto run as root,--yesto approve all ask user questions, and--unsafefor both.- Tools can now provide plain text alternatives to HTML, for display in the
datasette agent chatCLI. #31
The datasette agent chat content.db -m gpt-5.5 --unsafe command can now be used to chat directly with a specific database and directly modify it through prompts like "create a notes table", "add a note about X" etc.