Amazon Sparked an AI Ban and Fungi Span the Galaxy

Here's an uncomfortable twist: Amazon, one of Anthropic's biggest investors, may have handed the White House the ammunition it needed to kneecap its own portfolio company.

According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, a cybersecurity paper from Amazon's research team set off a chain of events that ended with the U.S. government blocking foreign nationals from accessing Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. The paper claimed Amazon researchers were able to extract cyberattack-relevant information from Fable 5 through a series of targeted prompts. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy then took those findings directly to White House officials — and shortly after that conversation, the export control directive landed.

The collateral damage was immediate and a little absurd. Many of Anthropic's own researchers are foreign-born, which meant the ban effectively locked employees out of the very products they built.

Anthropic pushed back hard on the government's framing. The company rejected the word "jailbreak" to describe what Amazon found, arguing that similar outputs could be produced using other widely available models, including OpenAI's GPT 5.5. That's a pointed comparison — essentially saying the government singled out Anthropic while letting competitors off the hook. Security professionals seemed sympathetic to that read. Katie Moussouris, founder of LutaSecurity and a respected voice in the vulnerability research world, was direct on Bluesky: "I've seen the paper. It's not a jailbreak."

The backstory here matters a lot. Anthropic and the Trump administration have had a frosty relationship for a while. The company has refused to let its models be used for mass surveillance of Americans or to operate lethal autonomous weapons — positions that put it firmly at odds with some of the administration's priorities. In February, Trump directed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's AI entirely. Within hours of that order, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went further and labeled the company a supply chain risk.

Things appeared to thaw. The two sides had been collaborating to expand government access to Mythos, which seemed like a sign the tension was easing. That goodwill now looks fragile at best.

Former Commerce Department official Kate Koren floated another theory to the WSJ: that the White House's existing animosity toward Anthropic may have shaped how seriously the Amazon research was taken and how quickly it translated into policy. That's speculation, but it's the kind of speculation that's hard to dismiss given the timeline.

What makes this story genuinely strange is the Amazon angle. The company owns a significant stake in Anthropic and has built major cloud infrastructure partnerships around Claude. Whether this was an honest security disclosure or something more complicated is a question nobody has cleanly answered — and Amazon hasn't said a word publicly.

Beneath your feet right now, there are fungal threads so numerous and so long that if you stretched them end to end, they would reach past the edge of our solar system — not once, but close to a billion times over.

A new study published in Science puts a number to something scientists have known existed but never fully mapped: the global network of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. The total length of these underground threads comes in at roughly 110 quadrillion kilometers. That figure is almost impossible to visualize, which is part of why the research is getting attention. This isn't just a fun fact — it reframes how we think about what's holding the planet's ecosystems together.

These fungi form symbiotic relationships with about 80 percent of all plant species on Earth. The arrangement is a clean trade: fungi deliver phosphorus and nitrogen to plant roots, and the plants supply carbon in return. About one billion tons of carbon gets locked underground this way every year. Without the fungi doing this work, that carbon would be cycling back into the atmosphere and accelerating warming. The networks are, in a very literal sense, a hidden climate tool.

What makes the new study different from previous work is scale and precision. Researchers from SPUN — the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, an organization specifically built to map these systems — combined global soil samples, a review of existing scientific literature, laboratory analysis, and machine learning to produce the first real map of where these networks are densest and where they're disappearing. Earlier research could identify fungal biodiversity in a given patch of soil. This study asks a bigger question: how much of this stuff is actually out there, and where?

The team found that grasslands host particularly dense networks, while agricultural land shows significant losses. That last point is worth sitting with. Industrial farming doesn't just affect what grows above ground — it degrades the underground infrastructure that makes plant growth possible in the first place.

The researchers used an analogy that lands well. Lead author Justin Stewart compared previous fungal studies to asking someone to describe the forest outside their window. They could tell you how many tree species are in it. But they couldn't tell you how big the forest is, how dense it is, or where it ends. This study finally gives scientists the structure, not just the species list.

The individual threads, called hyphae, are thinner than a strand of human hair. Their thinness is actually their advantage — they can penetrate deeper into soil than roots can, pulling up nutrients from places plants simply cannot reach on their own.

For a system this important, it has spent a remarkable amount of time being invisible to science. That's starting to change.