HOLDING FABLE EMBARGO AS MIRROR

IN 1995, MIT Press published a book that nobody was meant to read in the ordinary way. It was the complete source code of Pretty Good Privacy, Phil Zimmermann’s encryption programme, set in machine-readable type across some 900 pages.

- ADITYA SINHA

Washington had placed strong cryptography on the US Munitions List, alongside fighter aircraft and artillery, and exporting it without a licence was a crime. A book, however, was protected speech. You could not email the code abroad, but you could post the book, retype it and compile. The Ninth Circuit would later agree, in Bernstein, that source code was an expression. By around 2000, the controls had quietly collapsed, having mostly handicapped American firms while the mathematics spread anyway.

A generation on, the US has reached past the code to the thing the code produces. On June 9 this year, Anthropic released two versions of its most capable model. Fable 5 came wrapped in safety classifiers; Mythos 5 was the same engine with the guardrails lifted, locked to a handful of vetted partners. Three days later, a letter arrived from the US Commerce Secretary. Both models were subjected to export controls. No foreign national could use them, whether inside the US or outside it, and that included Anthropic’s own foreign-born employees. There is no way to verify the citizenship of everyone who opens a chat window, so the company did the only thing compliance allowed. It switched both models off—worldwide, for everybody. The most capable model ever made generally available to the public had a public life of three days.