A TikTok booth is seen during the opening day of Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, on August 21, 2024. (Photo by Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

More people might get to see the US government’s secret TikTok evidence

The American public is still trying to understand what the Chinese company is doing that would relegate it to being banned.

Matt Phillips, Rani Molla

8/23/24 11:39AM

We know that whatever caused the US government to try and ban TikTok is supposed to be big and bad.

But besides the vague idea that the Chinese government could force ByteDance to manipulate its algorithm, the US government has offered few details behind remarkable Congressional push to pass, and President Biden’s decision to sign, a law requiring TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance to sell the app, or face at total ban.

Now lawyers for the company — which is appealing the law — are asking that a so-called special master be appointed to evaluated classified evidence and the government’s need for secrecy.

The fight over who in the case gets to see what evidence — much of which will remain unavailable to the broader public — highlights the difficulty Americans have in understanding just what the U.S. government is so concerned about, when it comes to the popular app.

"We've seen a lot of really, I would say, a lot of really confusing messaging from members of Congress about why specifically they want to ban TikTok. Some are saying it's because of data collection, some are saying it's because of propaganda. Others others are saying it's just because TikTok is too addictive," Caitlin Chin-Rothmann, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who studies strategic technologies, told Sherwood in April. “We haven't really gotten a really clear explanation from the government of what specifically they believe the risks are.”

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

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Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5