Who decides when AI is too dangerous?

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Apatel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. My guest today is Hayden Field, the senior AI reporter here at The Verge. Often when Hayden shows up on Decoder, it's because something has gone wrong in the world of AI.

And last weekend, that something was a pretty intense mix of Anthropic, the Trump administration, and Anthropic's new model, Claude Fable V. On Friday, not even a week after Anthropic released Fable V to the public, the United States government said it was imposing export controls on that new model, as well as the underlying Mythos model that Fable was based on. Those controls restricted foreign nationals, even those working for Anthropic in the United States, from accessing these models. Anthropic then took Fable and Mythos offline for everyone, because the company said it was worried it would not be able to restrict access and reasonably comply with that order otherwise. As you might imagine, this is all a giant mess.

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