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The Korean Telecom Giant At the Center of Anthropic's Mythos Controversy (wired.com) 17

Posted by BeauHD from the behind-the-scenes dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The Trump administration's move to impose export controls on Anthropic's most powerful AI technology followed a spat over the company granting South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom access to its Claude Mythos model, according to people familiar with the matter. US officials were concerned about what they alleged were SK Telecom's ties to China, those people said. Those concerns appear to have compounded when Amazon later flagged vulnerabilities to the White House it identified in Fable 5, a highly safeguarded version of Mythos that Anthropic released to the public on June 9. The Amazon researchers claimed that it was possible to circumvent some of Fable 5's guardrails and access Mythos' formidable cybercapabilities, though Anthropic and outside cybersecurity experts have argued these risks are not unique to Claude.

The confluence of events is what ultimately led the White House to determine that it could not trust Anthropic to safeguard its most advanced AI technology, according to a person close to the administration. On Friday, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to revoke access to Mythos and Fable 5 for all foreign nationals, including immigrants inside the US. Rather than gate access to its technology based on nationality, a process that would be difficult to implement while also preserving privacy, Anthropic decided it was better to disable access to the models entirely. The White House and Anthropic still remain at odds after days of negotiations about bringing Claude Mythos and Fable 5 back online. SK Telecom was one of roughly 150 organizations granted early access to Anthropic's vulnerability-detection model Claude Mythos through Project Glasswing, notes Wired. The White House later asked Anthropic to revoke the company's access, reportedly amid concerns about alleged China ties, and Anthropic immediately complied. There was, however, no mention of the telecom in the government's formal demand to restrict Mythos and Fable 5 to U.S. nationals.

SK Telecom told a Korean newspaper that the "anonymous insider's remarks in foreign media lack verified facts, and our company has no ties to China."

The Korean Telecom Giant At the Center of Anthropic's Mythos Controversy More | Reply

The Korean Telecom Giant At the Center of Anthropic's Mythos Controversy

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  • SK telecom and China (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

    When it comes to SK Telecom, US natsec bureaucracy probably has classified data, but going by the public records, I recall them having a major data leak scandal in recent years.

    But much more worrisome from US perspective is the general history of PRC penetration of all major ROK conglomerates. It's how a lot of Korean tech got leaked to PRC, and this isn't rumors. There are many criminal convictions of Korean nationals for this specific kind of criminality. So when those companies can't protect key tech of

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      The problem here is the assumption there is any technical reason at all. That's not how the Trump administration works.

    • In this case you don't have look for anything shady to see the connection. There's a lot of dishonest messaging about "SK Telecom" not having strong connections to China, but SK Telecom is a subsidiary of SK Group, which does have extensive investments in almost every industry in China.

  • Fuck the liars at Anthropic. They said they'd found THOUSANDS of operating systems bugs. They've published a few dozen, only a handful have PoC exploits, they published a couple dozen "checksums" they said they'd use as proof "later", and only one of their discoveries has a been an RCE (in a not-enabled-by-default NFSd package for FreeBSD). Everything else is a boring, easily prevented, and not-really-all-that-interesting local privs escalation. No remote OpenSSL bugs, no remote OpenSSH bugs. YAAAAAAWWWWWW

  • Sure, whatever, anyway (Score:3)

    by oumuamua ( 6173784 ) on Friday June 19, 2026 @02:41PM (#66200858)
    What it boils down to is the common peasants cannot get access to top models while a chosen few others do - the already big companies. Furthermore, this looks to be the case from HERE ON OUT because every later model will be better than the previous. Well look on the bright side, they have to release them when the opensource Chinese models catch up to match capability, otherwise everyone will use those.

    Now the big question is: Is there any way they can ban the Chinese models short of blocking the whole internet?
    • Iâ(TM)m okay with blocking the internet. It was a nice idea, but itâ(TM)s just not working out.

    • Well look on the bright side, they have to release them when the opensource Chinese models catch up to match capability, otherwise everyone will use those.

      Yes, this is inevitable. GLM 5.2 was released this month and it is right on the heals of GPT 5.5 and not far behind Fable 5. DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen, MiniMax are all only a few months behind too. There is no moat.

      Is there any way they can ban the Chinese models short of blocking the whole internet?

      The chinese models are open weight, which means anyone can download them and run them on their own hardware. They are all only each about 1 terabyte. There is no way governments can shut them down. China could shut down the labs and prevent progress, but once an open weight model is uploaded the

  • Recalling the state of OpenAI's corporate IT security when they dropped their first LLM model to the public. It was crazy pathetic. Like Mattel's "My first company" bad. No idea on Anthropic but I would strongly expect that China, Russia, among others have already penetrated. Only the fact that neither govt really knows what they are doing yet, and don't have the full-scale hardware would keep them from running Mythos or whatever today. Also that you don't use your secret weapon to just steal credit

  • On the part of senior parts of the US government administration.

    US Gov Logic: Korea = Asian, China = Asian. Therefore Korea company linked to China.

    This is the same type of Republican US Government "logic" used to bomb and invade Iraq in 2003:
    Saudi Arabian Terrorists attacked USA. Saudi Arabia = Arab, Iraq = Arab (and unpopular). Therefore, Bomb Iraq!

    If you think there is classified intel providing more rationale than this, you are almost certainly deluded.

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