In 2023, a company called Alabama Community News LLC supposedly spent $3.2 million to buy 47 weekly newspapers across the state. The corporate owners fired the local staff, replaced them with an artificial intelligence system that scraped high school sports scores, and promptly drove the entire network into bankruptcy. The story even named a specific 26-year-old campaign staffer who generated 70 percent of the copy.

None of it actually happened. The entire 1,900-word saga was a fabrication published by a site called The Editorial, according to an investigation by Nieman Lab. The targeted newspapers, including the Shelby County Reporter and the Centreville Press, are still printing. The angry local advertisers quoted in the piece do not exist. The story falsely claimed the roll-up was funded by 1819 News, a real conservative outlet in the state, adding a layer of plausibility to the hoax.

The fake story gained traction among journalists on social media platforms like Bluesky before the operators pulled it down. They replaced the page with a sterile retraction notice citing “fact-verification concerns.” But the Alabama hoax was not an isolated incident.

The Editorial has built a bizarre subgenre of AI-generated obituaries for real American newspapers. The site previously published fabricated stories detailing the collapse of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Kenosha News, and the Macon Telegraph. The nonexistent reporters credited with these stories sport fake resumes claiming past stints at ProPublica and Reuters.

The motive behind the site remains murky. Domain registration and payment records point to a Finnish technology company called Nordiso Group, which develops AI study apps. Yet the site’s political sections suggest a different angle. The Editorial publishes a high volume of geopolitical content focused on Taiwan and the South China Sea, heavily pushing narratives that highlight Chinese military dominance.

These geopolitical stories share obvious synthetic fingerprints. Nearly every piece opens with a variation of the exact same scene: a nondescript, windowless conference room where a secret document slides across a table. This repetitive structure aligns with tactics tracked by groups like the Stanford Internet Observatory, which monitors state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. It also highlights how cheap synthetic media allows operators to flood niche topics, a trend we track closely at The Media Copilot.

For publishers, this represents a strange new vector of reputational risk. Newsrooms are used to fighting disinformation about elections or public health, but now they must monitor for synthetic hoaxes about their own business operations. A fake story about a newspaper shutting down or firing its staff can spook actual advertisers and confuse real subscribers before the publisher even realizes the rumor exists.

The barrier to generating convincing local news copy is gone. Operators no longer need to understand the nuances of a community to write a plausible story about it. They only need a prompt and a target, leaving local editors to clean up the mess when the synthetic fallout hits their own backyards.

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Google’s AI-generated search summaries are frontlining details about the recent suicide of a public figure at the top of search results, raising concerns that AI products are amplifying sensitive information that traditional news guidelines advise against publicizing. 

This incident highlights a growing challenge for AI search products as they determine not only what information is relevant, but what deserves emphasis. 

Nicola Agius, CEO of the newsbranch Reach, was the first to identify the issue on June 30 after seeing an Instagram post stating that the brother of Caroline Flack, a former presenter for the U.K. reality show Love Island, had died. Agius searched for “Caroline Flack brother” on Google to verify the news.

Not only did Google’s AI Overview confirm his death, Agius shared that it prominently stated that he had died by suicide, also including the location, method and the effect on his body. The summary also detailed how he was found. 

The Media Copilot was able to replicate the result on July 3. Using the same search query, Google’s AI Overview stated the method of death alongside all facts detailed above. The search was conducted by a reporter in Europe. Results from searches in the United States, however, did not always show the details of his death. 

The Media Copilot also found that even when Google’s AI Overview does not initially surface details of a suicide, simple follow-up prompts can elicit extensive information, including the method, location, police reports, descriptions of the scene and other sensitive information. 

The content displayed by Google’s AI Overview originated in publisher reporting, but they were given greater prominence in the AI-generated summary than in the source articles themselves. In some cases, the information was even removed from the original reporting altogether. One publication cited by Google for the cause of death no longer included those details in the linked article by July 3, while other outlets continued to reference them but with less prominence. 

The Associated Press guidelines on reporting suicide urge publishers “to not go into detail on the methods used.”

“It is incredibly worrying—and disappointing—to see some press sovereign and AI overviews including references to methods of suicide,” said Lois Sparks, head of safeguarding at Mind, a mental health charity, in an interview with Press Gazette. “Not only can these AI summaries be incredibly triggering for people to see so prominently, but in some instances, there is little signposting to mental health support.”

The Media Copilot’s inquiry did trigger a support message, which stated: “If you or someone you know is struggling, support is available in the U.K. by calling the Samaritans at 116 123 or texting SHOUT to 85258. In the U.S., you can call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.”

“Broadly, AI overviews give an illusion of definitiveness,” Sparks said. “They make highly sensitive and nuanced areas seem like concrete facts. If AI overviews are covering news, then they must be regulated to the same standards of traditional media—which they are currently not.”

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For the second time this year, Google has removed and then reinstated a Press Gazette investigation into Clickout Media from its search results after an anonymous complaint under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, restoring it only after the outlet pressed for comment. The delisted article reported that theU.K.-based marketing company had published AI-generated news stories containing factual errors and fabricated information.

The Press Gazette piece, published last week under the headline “AI reporters churn out error-strewn stories for football websites,” reported how Clickout Media acquired three established U.K. football news websites and began publishing stories under AI-generated reporter bylines that Press Gazette found contained numerous errors.

According to records in the Lumen transparency database, which publishes DMCA takedown notices Google receives, an entity identifying itself as “DRF Corp” accused Press Gazette of “willfully” copying its content and images. The complaint claimed the original work was a now-deleted Reddit post. Press Gazette said the allegedly infringing content was unrelated to its investigation. 

The latest takedown follows a similar incident in March, when Google removed a Press Gazette investigation into Clickout Media from its search results after another anonymous complaint. The article reported that the company had acquired news websites to drive traffic to its promotion of online casino content. Google reinstated the story after Press Gazette sought comment. 

The second article has since been reinstated as well after Press Gazette pressed Google for comment. But the pattern of the same target, the same anonymous complaint and a reversal by Google when challenged has drawn criticism from media industry figures, who say bad actors can exploit copyright takedown systems to remove legitimate reporting from search results while low-quality AI-generated content remains visible. 

Dominic Young, chief executive of the micropayment firm Axate and a co-founder of the SPUR Coalition on AI licensing standards, condemned the takedowns in comments posted on LinkedIn. 

“By effectively rendering copyright infringement consequence-free, and reserving the right for tech platforms to profit from it, this law created anarchy online and made copyright infringement into a business model – now being exploited by AI companies and a swarm of proxies helping them get whatever they want, regardless of what the owners say,” Young said. 

The DMCA allows anyone to file a takedown notice regardless of whether they have registered their work with the U.S. Copyright Office. Google reviews each notice to ensure it meets legal and policy requirements. It is not required to remove the reported material, but failing to act on a valid notice could expose the company to secondary liability for copyright infringement, so it usually complies. 

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Cloudflare said Wednesday it will begin blocking AI training and agent crawlers by default on ad-supported websites, a change that could force companies such as Google, Apple and Microsoft to more clearly separate search indexing from AI training if they want continued access to large parts of the web.

The policy, scheduled to take effect Sept. 15, applies to new Cloudflare customers, new sites added by existing customers and existing Free-tier customers who have not changed their settings. Search crawlers will remain allowed by default, but training and agent crawlers will be blocked on pages that display ads.

The company said the changes are designed to help publishers remain visible in AI-powered search results while preventing their content from being used for AI training or autonomous agents without permission or compensation. 

“Now that the majority of traffic is non-human, we must go further and act faster so that a sustainable ecosystem can emerge,” said Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s co-founder and CEO. 

Splitting up mixed use crawlers

The Web giant said bots that combine search, AI training and agent activity—known as mixed use crawlers—without letting site owners choose among those uses will be blocked on ad-supported pages when training or agent access is blocked. In a company blog post, Cloudflare named Googlebot, Applebot and BingBot as multi-purpose crawlers that could be affected by the most restrictive applicable rules.

“We hope that our proposed default changes encourage mixed use crawlers to separate out search from agent use and training,” Prince said. 

Cloudflare said customers will be able to manage three categories of AI traffic: Search, which indexes content for later retrieval; Agent, which accesses a site on behalf of a user in real time; and Training, which collects content to train or fine-tune models. The controls are available to all Cloudflare customers, including those on the Free tier.

That distinction matters for smaller sites. A spokesperson for  Cloudflare said the new controls are intended to give all website owners more options for managing AI traffic, not only publishers with ads or subscriptions. But the default blocking policy is tied to pages with advertising, and Cloudflare’s compensation plans remain focused on commercial use cases where AI systems access or surface publisher content.

Alongside the new crawler controls, Cloudflare is expanding analytics to show publishers how bots interact with their content and how much traffic AI platforms send back. The company is also pushing into what it calls Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO, offering tools it says will help customers understand how often their content is cited or surfaced in AI-generated answers.

Cloudflare also announced efforts to reduce unnecessary AI crawling. According to the company, more than half of AI crawler traffic is spent repeatedly checking web pages that have not changed. Because Cloudflare sits between websites and online traffic, it says it can signal to AI companies when pages have been updated and worth revisiting. The company said it is testing those signals with AI firms and plans a broader rollout later this year. 

New compensation model

The company is also expanding its publisher compensation strategy by evolving its Pay Per Crawl program into a new system called Pay Per Use. Rather than paying publishers when content is crawled, the new model is designed to compensate them when their content is actually used in AI products. Cloudflare said it is working with AI companies including Ceramic.ai and You.com on the initiative. Under the arrangements, publishers could be paid when their content appears in AI search results or when AI agents access premium content on demand. 

But the model does not yet answer the hardest compensation question: what happens when a publisher’s work is used for model training but never appears in a cited answer? Asked whether Pay Per Use compensates publishers in that scenario, The spokesperson said the program is aimed at “programmatic, real-time access and discovery,” and described Pay Per Crawl and Pay Per Use as only two possible economic frameworks.

“The digital landscape is evolving rapidly,” said Marrissa Holloway for Cloudflare. “We welcome ideas from publishers, creators, and AI companies alike on how to build a thriving agentic Internet.”

Holloway did not directly say what Cloudflare’s cut of any revenue generated would be. “It has always been our philosophy that our customers derive many multiples of value more than they pay us,” she said.

The Media Copilot’s take

Cloudflare is not solving AI compensation for the whole Web. It’s building a bargaining layer for larger publishers with enough traffic and revenue to measure, block and negotiate. That helps the larger content outlets, but smaller sites and independent publishers will get switches to turn on and off. That’s useful, but switches don’t mean they have leverage. The long tail of the Web—the indy blog sites, community web pages and hobby sites—can say “no” more clearly, but there still no obvious way for them to get paid when their work is used for an AI’s training data and never comes back with a citation or link.

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Anthropic restored global access to Claude Fable 5 on Wednesday, one day after launching Claude Sonnet 5, closing out an 18-day export-control suspension that had cut off both of the company’s newest flagship models since mid-June. Anthropic also restored access to the more powerful Mythos 5 model for a set of U.S. organizations approved under its Glasswing cybersecurity program.

The back-to-back announcements come at a sensitive moment for the company. Increasingly more capable models, like OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 family, draw heightened scrutiny from the U.S. government over national security and cybersecurity concerns. 

The suspension began June 12, when the U.S. government applied export controls to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after Amazon researchers reported a technique that allowed Fable 5 to identify software vulnerabilities, and, in one case, produce code demonstrating how to exploit one. 

Anthropic said it had found that several less-capable models, including Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could replicate the same behavior, and that the bypass didn’t expose any capability unique to Mythos 5. The company nonetheless spent the following weeks working with the government to fix it, training a new safety classifier that it says blocks the specific technique “in over 99% of cases.”

Anthropic acknowledged the new classifier could flag more benign coding and debugging requests as it errs toward caution. Newsrooms and media teams running Claude Code or agentic research workflows should expect occasional false-positive refusals on security-adjacent tasks going forward.

Fable 5 is rolling out today across Claude Platform, Claude.ai, Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Pro, Max, Team and select Enterprise plans can access it for up to half of their weekly usage limits through July 7. Then, access will shift to usage credits. 

Sonnet 5, which Anthropic launched late on June 30, is Anthropic’s middle ground between capability and safety. According to the company, the model performs close to the former top model, Opus 4.8, but at a cheaper price: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. The price will rise to $3 and $15, respectively, on Sept. 1.

Security concerns

But the same capabilities that make AI systems more useful can also make them more dangerous, raising questions about whether safety measures are keeping pace with rapidly advancing model performance.  

In its announcement, Anthropic sought to reassure users that Fable 5 has adequate security measures and Sonnet 5 poses a relatively low risk. The company said the Sonnet model is better than its predecessor at refusing malicious requests and resisting prompt injection attacks, a common technique used to manipulate AI systems into bypassing their safeguards. 

However, Anthropic says that while Sonnet 5 exhibited fewer undesirable behaviors overall than Sonnet 4.6, it also showed higher rates of misaligned behavior than both Opus 4.8 and Claude Mythos Preview, which have stricter safety controls. 

“Sonnet 5 was never able to develop a full working exploit, but it does show a slightly higher rate of partial success than Sonnet 4.6. This latter change is likely due to improvements in general intelligence rather than specific training,” Anthropic said in its press release. 

These results suggest that improvements in general reasoning and problem-solving abilities may also increase the model’s capacity to assist with offensive cyber activities, although the company emphasized that Sonnet 5 was unable to develop a complete exploit for Firefox vulnerabilities.

The findings reflect a broader concern among governments and security researchers: AI models do not necessarily need specialized cybertraining to become more useful to attackers. As reasoning and problem-solving abilities improve, models may naturally become more effective at identifying vulnerabilities, generating attack strategies and assisting with technical exploitation.

“Because we judged that the overall level of cybersecurity risk from Sonnet 5 was low, the safeguards are less strict than those launched with Fable 5, which block a much wider range of cybersecurity tasks,” Anthropic said. 

The company said Mythos 5, which is still restricted to a small set of companies and organizations in Glasswing, “can be used to find and exploit software vulnerabilities more effectively than any other model — and all but the most skilled human security experts.” 

Fable 5, however, launched with what Anthropic called the strongest safeguards it has ever applied to a model, after doubling its safety research staff in the month before launch. Researchers from the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation tested both the original and updated safeguards and, Anthropic said, “agree that they are extraordinarily strong.”

U.S. government collaboration

With the lifting of the Mythos and Fable restrictions, Anthropic is further deepening its cooperation with the U.S. government. This marks an abrupt turnaround for the company, which has had a turbulent relationship with the Trump administration since the Pentagon labeled the company a supply chain risk in late February. The feud arose over Anthropic’s opposition to the use of its Claude models for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons systems. 

Reuters reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a letter sent to Anthropic that the company would work with the government on safety protocols for Mythos, Fable and future models, and to disclose any malicious activity it detects. However, Lutnick warned that the department “reserves the right to reevaluate the decisions made in this letter and the necessity of reimposing a license requirement, should circumstances change or should Anthropic fail to adhere to its commitments.”

“Our hope is that this collaboration … will serve as the basis for systematic rules for the whole industry,” Anthropic said in its Fable 5 release, “and even offer the beginnings of a template for effective global coordination on the risks and benefits of AI.”

The company is currently appealing the supply-chain risk designation in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. It’s unclear how today’s announcement will affect the suit.

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OpenAI said that it plans to give a select group of government-approved partners early access to GPT-5.6 Sol, its most powerful AI model to date, before releasing the product more broadly. The limited rollout follows a request from the Trump administration, which asked the company to adopt a phased launch strategy for its next-generation AI system while security reviews are conducted. 

Last week’s request came from the White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director and Office of Science and Technology Policy, which have pushed AI developers to give federal agencies early access to frontier models so officials can evaluate their capabilities and potential security risks before wider deployment,

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees in a memo that GPT 5.6-Sol will initially be available to 20 approved partners, including Amazon’s Bedrock platform. According to the memo, access is being granted on a “customer-by-customer” basis while the review process is underway. 

“We’ve made clear to the U.S. government that this is not our preferred long term model, and will work with them and others in industry to achieve a more sustainable approach for future releases,” Altman said in the memo. Altman said he hopes to release GPT-5.6 to the public a “couple of weeks later.”

The decision reflects growing concern over what the Trump administration says are legitimate national security implications of increasingly capable AI systems. 

OpenAI says GPT-5.6 Sol is its most advanced model to date, with improvements in reasoning, autonomous task execution, software engineering and cybersecurity-related capabilities. It released benchmarks that said its performance was broadly comparable to Anthropic’s Mythos 5, which was withdrawn on June 12 following a directive from the Commerce Department expressing concerns that its advanced capabilities could create new cybersecurity threats. 

At the time, Anthropic said the concerns were over “a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities” and that “other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.” 

Politico reported that the initial vulnerability was brought directly to the White House by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. (Amazon is an investor in Anthropic.)

“We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe,” Anthropic said in its statement.

Anthropic and the Trump administration have been sparring for months since a dispute over how Anthropic’s models would be used by the Pentagon. Reports that the company’s models were used in U.S. operations in Venezuela in January, in violation of its licensing terms, which prohibit using Claude models to commit violence, led to a near complete rupture. 

Adding further layers to the drama, just hours after OpenAI announced the limited rollout of GPT-5.6, Anthropic disclosed that the Trump administration had approved a limited release of Mythos 5, reversing the Commerce Department restriction. 

The restrictions on GPT-5.6 Sol and Mythos 5 follow a recent call from the Five Eyes alliance for closer coordination on advanced AI development and security. A White House official said the administration continues “to collaborate with frontier AI labs to develop shared approaches for addressing the challenges of scaling this technology.” 

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Anthropic has unveiled Claude Tag, a new Slack-based AI agent designed to work alongside employees inside workplace conversations. The launch marks the company’s latest push to move its models beyond answering question-and-answer interactions and toward ongoing task execution within enterprise software. 

Users can invoke Claude Tag by mentioning “@Claude” in configured Slack channels to ask questions, summarize discussions, run data analysis, or complete tasks on behalf of a team. Anthropic says the system is assigned a single shared identity per channel, allowing it to retain context across conversations and build a persistent understanding of team workflows and projects. If Claude Tag is granted access to multiple Slack channels, it will also scan those channels to better understand a task—provided the agent has been given permission to do so.

The agent can also surface relevant updates without being prompted in a so-called ambient mode, flagging relevant information or sending reminders when work stalls. It also enables employees to track progress and take over tasks left incomplete by colleagues.

Anthropic describes the system as “a real colleague who can present work publicly, with much more context and understanding than before.”

The launch expands Anthropic’s footprint in enterprise software, a crowded and increasingly competitive market as AI companies race to embed their models into workplace tools, sometimes despite workers’ reluctance. Salesforce introduced dozens of new AI features for Slack and Slackbot in March, including Agentforce integrations and reusable AI skills. Claude Tag differentiates itself by focusing on continuity within channels and enabling work to be handed off between employees and AI agents. 

Claude Tag is currently available in beta for Claude Enterprise and Claude Team customers using Slack. Anthropic says administrators will control which channels, tools and data the AI can access, a safeguard aimed at addressing concerns about security and information exposure. The company says it plans to expand the feature beyond Slack, but has not yet announced a timeline or for which platforms.

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NewsGuard, a company best known for rating the reliability of online news sources, on Tuesday launched NewsGuard AI, a chatbot that draws exclusively from a database of journalist-vetted stories instead of the open web.

The launch comes as concerns persist over the accuracy of AI-generated responses. NewsGuard said a yearlong audit of leading AI models found they repeated false or misleading claims on controversial news topics 35% of the time. The company argues that limited responses to vetted sources can help reduce the spread of misinformation through AI systems. 

NewsGuard AI attributes information directly to the publishers whose reporting is used in its responses, unlike other chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity.

Participanting publishers include The Atlantic and other regional newspapers, opinion journals, and public media organizations. Readers, subscribers and members of some participating outlets will receive a free trial of NewsGuard AI followed by an offer for 33% off the chatbot’s standard $6 monthly subscription. 

The company also says it will share revenue with participating publishers through a 50-50 revenue-sharing model and affiliate-style subscription referrals, though it has not publicly disclosed the formula used to calculate payouts.

NewsGuard says its journalists have reviewed more than 36,000 sources since 2018, including newspapers, magazines, opinion publications, local news outlets, independent newsletters, government websites, think tanks, hospitals and research universities. Of these, roughly 12,000 have been rated reliable and are eligible to be cited by NewsGuard AI. 

The new service enters a rapidly evolving market in which publishers are negotiating licensing agreements with AI companies while also challenging the unauthorized use of their reporting. Media organizations have struck content deals with companies including OpenAI, Amazon and Meta, even as lawsuits and public disputes over AI scraping continue across the industry.

Chris Richmond, CEO of the fact-checking website Snopes, said the arrangement addressed concerns his organization has had with other AI products.

“Snopes has restricted most AI chatbots from scraping our content,” Richmond said. “But we’re happy to partner with NewsGuard on a model that does this the right way.” 

In addition to drawing from vetted sources, NewsGuard AI says it incorporates 41 editorial safeguards. These include access to NewsGuard’s database of 64,000 debunked false claims circulating online, which the company says help prevent the chatbot from repeating known misinformation. Users can also access detailed explanations debunking false claims and share them with others. 

“Few things will matter more in the near future than the ability of humans to figure out what’s real, what’s false, and what’s confabulated nonsense,” said Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic. “This is particularly true when it comes to news.”

NewsGuard is also targeting educational institutions. Students at participating schools and universities will receive free access while enrolled. The company says the chatbot has been designed to refuse requests to write essays or reports for users. 

“NewsGuard AI can provide reliable research while not substituting for students doing their own writing and thinking,” said NewsGuard’s Chief Operating Officer Matt Skibinski.

Local language versions of NewsGuard AI will be available in French, German and Italian in September. 

The post Can AI deliver trustworthy news? NewsGuard thinks its new Chatbot has the answer appeared first on The Media Copilot.

Cloudflare, Inc. and beehiiv, a newsletter-focused publishing platform, announced a strategic partnership on June 23, which they say will give independent creators greater control over how AI tools access, discover, and use their work.

Cloudflare’s advanced Crawl Control technology is integrated into the beehiiv platform, offering tools to monitor AI crawler activity in real time and manage those crawlers’ access to their content. This integration gives creators two options for managing their digital footprint: publishers can either allow all or some AI search engines to freely crawl their content for greater visibility or completely block AI scraping to protect their archives for future monetization and licensing.

Managing AI bots historically required manually updating robots.txt files or configuring firewalls. The Cloudflare–beehiiv partnership removes these steps, allowing publishers of all sizes, from major media organizations to independent creators, to easily set automated preferences through the platform’s standard dashboard settings. 

Key features of the integration include personalized analytics showing exactly which AI crawlers are accessing their content, which are being blocked, and how much referral traffic they generate, as well as one-click controls to allow or block specific AI models and automatic updates that extend those controls to new crawlers as they appear. 

Tyler Denk, co-founder and CEO of beehiiv, said AI bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft had crawled content hosted on the platform 490 million times. 

“Creators and publishers should own and control their work,” Denk wrote, adding that they “may want to be indexed to maximize AI discovery” or “may want to keep [their] valuable content private and not crawled by AI bots.” 

Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, echoed Denk’s statement: “As the internet evolves, [Cloudflare’s] commitment remains the same: ensuring creators have the tools they need to thrive,” Price said. “This partnership with beehiiv is the next logical step in that mission, giving newsletter operators the transparency and control to navigate the AI era on their own terms.”

AI Crawl Control has now launched in beta for all beehiiv users, giving publishers new visibility into  how AI systems access their content and the traffic those crawlers generate.  

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Intelligence agencies for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States warned in a rare joint statement that AI-powered cyberattacks capable of overwhelming government and business defenses may be just months away. 

The June 22 statement by the agencies—known as the Five Eyes—says they anticipate the advanced capabilities of frontier models like Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s Daybreak will “exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities.” 

The agencies did not publicly detail the evidence underlying their assessment, but the warning aligns with concerns public cybersecurity and AI experts have been raising for months. The statement comes just days after the U.S. government issued an export control directive to Anthropic to suspend all foreign nationals’ access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, whether inside or outside the country. The order is one of the most wide-ranging government responses to the capabilities of an AI model to date. 

“We now estimate a narrow three-to-five month window for organizations to outpace the adversary before AI-driven exploits start to become the new norm,” warned Lee Klarich, chief technology officer of the cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks in May. “This impending vulnerability deluge demands urgency.” 

The alliance’s warning targeted leaders not only of governments and corporations, but of small and medium businesses around the world, urging them to gauge their organizations’ risk levels, review readiness measures, and remain actively engaged with emerging AI-related threats. The agencies identified outdated systems, slow patch management, unnecessary internet connectivity, weak access controls and inadequate incident-response planning by organizations as vulnerabilities leaving organizations especially vulnerable to AI-enabled cyberattacks. 

The statement included a set of practical actions that leaders can use to strengthen their defenses, including limiting who and what can connect to systems, quickly installing security updates and replacing outdated and unsupported technology. The statement also advised strictly controlling who has access to sensitive or confidential information and to regularly practice response drills in case of an attack.

“Success will not come from having the most tools,” the intelligence agencies said. “It will come from getting the basics right, acting quickly, and integrating cyber security into core business strategy.”

At its core, the guidance reinforces a long-standing recommendation: cybersecurity should be treated as central to operational continuity rather than as a secondary concern. And, coming as it does so soon after the order to Anthropic, it reflects how rapidly threats are evolving as frontier AI systems advance and governments and companies struggle to keep step. 

“The rapid pace of frontier AI development means cyber risk assumptions can become outdated in months, not years,” the agencies said. “In that spirit, we call on leaders across industry to act now and work together to protect our people and secure our future.”

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