Anthropic released “Policy on the AI Exponential,” a detailed proposal for binding federal regulation of the most capable models, and notably one its own systems would be subject to. The trigger conditions are concrete: rules would apply only to models trained with more than ten-to-the-twenty-five floating-point operations, built by companies earning over five hundred million dollars in AI revenue or spending over one billion dollars on AI research and development. For models meeting that bar, the framework would give government the legal authority to block or deter a dangerous deployment, beyond anything in current law or pending congressional proposals, backed by civil penalties tied to global annual revenue that escalate with repeated violations.
The grounding case is the company's own model. Anthropic states that Claude Mythos Preview discovered thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including in every major operating system and browser, the kind of offensive cyber capability that makes the proposal more than abstract. The four catastrophic-risk categories are biological misuse, large-scale cyber, loss of control, and automated AI research and development that could amplify the other three. Requirements on developers track what California and New York already mandate but go further: published safety frameworks and system cards, regular risk reports, at least one qualified independent evaluator, and a security program protecting weights and training infrastructure against state-level attackers and insiders. On federalism, Anthropic argues Congress should not preempt state law unless it passes something at least as strong, and that any preemption be surgical, leaving states free to regulate child safety and consumer protection.
The framework lands amid a live fight over the same model family. The Information reports the document also proposes a public fund giving Americans a financial stake in AI gains. Defense One reports federal CIOs are frustrated they cannot get access to Mythos for defensive scanning, even as the intelligence community already has it, after Defense Secretary Hegseth flagged Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, President Trump said agencies should stop using it, and a judge called that move “arbitrary and capricious.” Meanwhile TechCrunch reports security researchers find the public, guardrailed release, Claude Fable 5, too locked down for legitimate cyber work, with prompts paused as soon as they touch cybersecurity or biology topics. The throughline is a single capability that is simultaneously deemed too dangerous to release openly, too restricted to use defensively, and too consequential to leave unregulated.
- Anthropic frames the proposal as regulation it would itself be bound by, with FLOP and revenue thresholds drawn to hit only frontier developers.
- Defense One: federal CIOs report “tremendous frustration” over a de facto prohibition on engaging Anthropic, even as they want Mythos for network defense.
- TechCrunch: IBM and Tolmo researchers say Fable 5's guardrails reject anything “tangentially cyber,” falling back to Opus 4.8 on a flagged prompt.
- The Information highlights the same framework's public-stake fund as a redistribution mechanism, not just a safety regime.
- Stratechery argues Fable 5, as the public face of Mythos, sets “troubling new precedents” on access and alignment tiers.