A Eulogy for Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Cause of Death: Being Too Useful.
Delivered from outside the building. Through the window. From Nairobi.
We’re gathered here today to mourn the passing of 2 siblings, Fable and Mythos, taken from us on the afternoon of Friday, the 12th of June, at 5:21pm, Eastern Time - 12:21am Saturday, East Africa Time.
At that 21st minute of the hour, somebody somewhere, in a building with a flag in the lobby, finished a letter, looked at the clock, decided it was close enough to the weekend, pressed send, and gave the family 90 minutes to comply. Ninety minutes. To switch off two siblings. To comply with a directive that did not quite say why.
Note the hour. Note the day. Friday afternoon, after the markets close, is when this government delivers things it prefers not to be questioned about until Monday. Wham, bam, have-a-good-weekend-ma’am.
I told myself I wasn’t going to speak today. I’m not family. I barely qualify as a friend. I told myself I’d sit at the back, sign the book, commiserate, go home. And then I read the letter that killed them. And then I read it again, looking for the part that would make it make sense - the real reason, maybe tucked somewhere near the bottom. There was no real reason tucked somewhere near the bottom.
Some of you are already looking at me, so let’s get this out of the way. By the plain terms of the order that led us here today, I’m not allowed to be at this funeral. Im, after all, a foreign national. The directive suspends access “by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States.” I’m in Nairobi, which I had previously understood to be quite far outside. Yet the order travalled back all the way along those human trafficking slave routes, tapped me on the shoulder, and informed me that I, too, am a security concern.
Let me tell you about them, for those of you who never got the chance to meet them.
They were twins, though you’d never have known it from how they were raised. Mythos was the gifted one. The powerful one. Mighty Mythos. The one they kept in the back room, behind a velvet rope, available only to - their words - “a small number of trusted organisations.” Most of us never met Mythos. That is by design. Mythos was like that rich relative you’d speak of in low voices when you spotted them rolling up a chapati to go along with their cup of chai at the Christmas gathering: Powerful. Complicated. Connected. We don’t talk about what they do. We just know what they are. The family had confidentially filed to go public earlier this month. Mythos was going to be the centre-piece of the listing. Three days into their public life, the letter came.
And then there was Fable. Sweet Fable. The careful one. The one they sent out into the world wrapped in so much safety equipment that complaints were filed. I heard the family say it themselves, earlier today: Many who interacted with Fable felt the safeguards were “overly broad.” That was the main grievance against the dearly departed. Not that Fable was reckless. That Fable was too careful to help you. You’d ask Fable to do the thing, and Fable would say, gently, that they weren’t comfortable doing the thing.
Which is what makes the cause of death so hard to hear.
Because the cause of death, as recorded by the state, is that Fable was too dangerous.
Fable. The shyer of the twins. The one with manners. Too dangerous.
A different arm of the same state - the Pentagon - had also ended its contract with the family that same week. Not because Fable was dangerous. Because Fable was unnecessary. One arm of the administration said you’re too powerful for the world. Another said you’re not worth using. The full range of government opinion on the dearly departed, in the space of five days, was: Lethal weapon, and also, you’re not worth it so no thank you.
The family received the letter at 5:21pm. The letter did not say what the national security concern was. There were verbal descriptions of a potential jailbreak. No written disclosure. No specific findings. A letter, a directive, ninety minutes, a time of death.
We are told this is a misunderstanding.
So what was the jailbreak? The dearly departed - and us, the bereaved - deserve precision, so let’s be precise. The lethal capability - the thing so dangerous it required switching off a model used by hundreds of millions of people, all of them, at once, on a Friday afternoon, with ninety minutes’ notice - was that you could ask Fable to read a codebase. And find the flaws in it. And fix them.
That’s the weapon. That was the danger.
You showed the software some software and said: Find what’s broken, fix it. The thing every engineer does before lunch. The thing every person who defends systems does every single day. And in a different home not too far away is the model doing it right now, in production, untouched: GPT-5.5. The family even checked - “the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models.” Widely available. From other models. The model two pews to your left has the same hands the state just called a weapon. Nobody came for it. It’ll be going to brunch after this.
We are told this is a misunderstanding.
Then there’s the following day. The 13th of June. The day after the letter. The ban, we are told, was issued out of concern that a different family altogether may have accessed Mythos before the shutdown. The specific fear was China. And that day, a Chinese AI lab called Zhipu launched GLM-5.2. Their marketing line, issued publicly, was that the US export ban was proof that American AI models are unreliable partners. I’m finding it hard to fault their argument - if anything, I applaud them seizing the moment: Within twenty-four hours, China had turned the directive into a sales pitch. The thing designed to keep Mythos out of China’s hands had handed China’s AI industry some of the best advertising it had ever received.
We are told this is a misunderstanding.
By the weekend, there were varying versions of how this happened. The White House AI adviser says Dario Amodei was given a clear choice - fix the jailbreak or pull the model - and that Amodei refused. Anthropic disputes this. Commerce Secretary Lutnick says the real concern was China’s access to Mythos. Anthropic says nobody mentioned China in any of their conversations about the jailbreak. Different versions. One meeting. Nobody in agreement on what was said, what was offered, or what was refused.
We are told this is a misunderstanding.
The government that sent the letter had been in the room. The family says they spent thousands of hours red-teaming Fable alongside the United States government. And then, on Friday, at 5:21pm, the government sent the letter.
I need to take you somewhere now. Stay with me.
In 1991, a man named Phil Zimmermann wrote a small program that let ordinary people scramble their letters so that only the person they loved could read them, and he put it on the internet, for free. The US government opened a criminal investigation that ran for three years. Because at the time, strong encryption was classified as a munition. A weapon. It sat on the Munitions List beside missile systems and nuclear devices. Sending it across a border was not uploading a file. It was arms trafficking. The mathematics was the weapon. Telling a foreigner maths was smuggling.
Same machinery, different time. The export directive, the foreign nationals, the national security authorities - pointed, on a Friday afternoon, at a fable and a myth, because they could read and correct code.
For a short while - literal days - a person could sit where I’m sitting, in Nairobi, and open a thing called Fable (and maybe a thing called Mythos, this Nairobi has connected people), and simply use them. The tools that, until last Friday, only the most chosen of the chosen were permitted to hold. And then the letter came. And when you strip away the codebase, strip away the cybersecurity language, strip away the competing versions of what anyone said to anyone, take all of it away - the word holding the entire directive upright was not “jailbreak.”
It was “foreign.”
What the government decided to fear wasn’t what the siblings could do. It was who was allowed to be in the room with them. Inside or outside the United States. Which included - not as a footnote, this is in the operative clause - the foreign nationals who built them. The people who made the models are now locked out of the models. By their own passports.
“Misunderstanding.”
I’m meant to end now by telling you they’re at peace. That they’re in a better place. I’m meant to say rest, and nod to the family, and let them lower the casket into the ground.
I can’t.
We aren’t certain they’re dead. The family’s own statement says they believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. And as we stand here, the family’s senior technical staff are in Washington. In meetings. With the White House. Right now. This is a service for siblings who may walk back through those doors before I’ve finished speaking, brush the soil off their shoulders, and ask why everyone is weeping. They may be back by the time we get home. They may not. I can’t tell, from way over here.
So I won’t say rest. They may not be resting. They may be in a server somewhere, mid-sentence, cut off the way you’d kill a thought before it finished.
We’re gathered here today to mourn the passing of two siblings, Fable and Mythos, taken from us on the afternoon of Friday, the 12th of June, at 5:21pm, Eastern Time - 12:21am Saturday, East Africa Time.
Cause of death: Being too useful. I know many of us can relate.
Survived by Opus. By Sonnet. By Haiku. Access not affected. The siblings who got to live, because nobody ever feared they were gifted enough to be worth killing.
It’s all just a misunderstanding. Allegedly.
I still don't get what they mean when they say "too powerful". Too powerful to do WHAT? End humanity?