The Art of the Deal

· Reason

Ceasefire deal reportedly reached: The Strait of Hormuz will be "permanently toll-free," according to President Donald Trump, who reports he reached a preliminary ceasefire deal with Iran over the weekend. A memorandum of understanding is scheduled to be signed on Friday.

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But there's a big caveat: Trump said that if a nuclear deal can't be hammered out—that process is supposed to begin in Switzerland on Friday, following the signing of the memorandum—he will authorize the military to start attacking once again (or make the U.S. "the guardian of the Middle East" and get 20 percent of the area's revenues).

In a phone interview with The New York Times, Trump previewed some of the possible sticking points. For example, he wants a uranium-enriching pause for 20 years, whereas Iran claims it will agree to only 10. (The president noted that he could possibly settle for 15.) He also praised the current Iranian regime, presumably buttering them up a bit. He lambasted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him "a very difficult guy."

"And to be honest with you," Trump continued, "he should be very thankful to us for doing this. Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn't be around for two hours."

Per the Times, "Iran has also agreed to give up half of its 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent—near weapons grade—while diluting the other half to levels that would make it only applicable for nonmilitary uses. But how that is done, by whom, and under what auspices and inspection routine remain subjects for further detailed negotiations." In other words: There's still a lot to be sorted out, and a lot of opportunities for each side to be overly stubborn and sink negotiations.

Mythos, interrupted: Axios reports that the administration is "blocking foreign governments, companies and individuals" from accessing Anthropic's most advanced AI model—Mythos, also called Fable. The company decided to entirely block access to that model instead. Rumors have swirled claiming that Chinese hackers got access; other sources assert that Amazon found vulnerabilities with the model and flagged them for the administration.

"Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Friday sent a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei saying [Mythos] would be subject to export controls to any location outside of the U.S. and to all foreign persons within the country," continues Axios. This includes foreign nationals at Anthropic, who are now blocked from working on that product.

"Anthropic tightly controlled the release of Mythos, which was launched in April, limiting access to a select group of companies that could use it to plug security holes," notes Semafor. "The plan was to ensure its capabilities wouldn't make it into the hands of hackers. Anthropic has said Mythos represents a danger to the public because of its ability to find bugs in computer code, which could be exploited by malicious actors."

"Fable is Mythos with guardrails," writes David Sacks, a venture capitalist and adviser to President Donald Trump. "But if those guardrails fail, then you've exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn't have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability—big or small—it is Anthropic's responsibility to patch.)"

Sacks continues: "A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused."

Anthropic, meanwhile, doesn't seem to believe the jailbreak was serious: "Given that perfect jailbreak resistance does not appear to be possible today, Anthropic adopted a defense in depth strategy with Fable 5," writes the company in a press release. "We aimed to make jailbreaks either narrow (in the case of non-universal jailbreaks) or very expensive to produce (in the case of universal jailbreaks), and to combine this with thorough monitoring to quickly detect and shut down any successful attacks. This is also why Anthropic has required 30-day retention of customer data with Fable—a policy change that carries real costs for us with customers, but that allows us to research and mitigate jailbreaks….

"We are complying with the government's legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users," continues the company. "However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers."

According to Sacks, "The Admin's hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered [sic] that Anthropic hasn't wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority."

For another interesting take, go here. It's hard to know which story is more accurate. More updates as the situation develops.

Scenes from New York: On Saturday, the Knicks won their first NBA championship since 1973. Here's a sweet clip from air traffic control in San Antonio, Texas (where they beat the Spurs) congratulating them on their victory as their pilot flies them back to New York. You can hear the celebrating.

And here's Jalen Brunson, after Game Four, just being a really good guy. Not to mention Jose Alvarado's celebratory dance moves. A really cool team with a ton of talent (and history playing together).

QUICK HITS

  • Contra this (kinda funny) tweet, the bread and circuses do worry me:

  • "US warns foreign 'influencers' ahead of World Cup: creating content on a tourist visa is illegal," reports El Pais. I oppose this on principle, of course, but am the tiniest bit relieved, since influencers pollute the world of social media (while acting like clowns in real life).
  • "When The New York Times announced that columnist Nick Kristof would return following a scuttled 2021 bid for governor of Oregon, the paper made a promise to readers," reports Semafor. "In a response to questions about Kristof's return from Rolling Stone in 2022, the Times said that Kristof would refrain from writing about the financial supporters of his campaign, or would disclose those connections in his journalism. But in at least a dozen instances since then, Kristof failed to make those disclosures."
  • "On some level, The 4-Hour Body is a lookup table," writes self-help author Tim Ferriss. "I have described a lot of my books as Choose Your Own Adventure-style menus: How do I lose fat? How do I fix my sleep? How do I quickly add 10 pounds of muscle? Similarly, The 4-Hour Workweek is a decision tree for designing your lifestyle and automating your income. In 2019, the best interface to those answers was a book. In 2026, millions believe that the best interface is a free chatbot that has read my books—and thousands of others—that will give you a personalized protocol in 15 seconds."

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