Anthropic announced on Friday that it would “abruptly disable” its cutting-edge AI model for all users after the U.S. government ordered it to suspend foreigners’ access to the model, citing national security concerns.
Anthropic said in a statement that it has received an export control directive suspending access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to all foreign nationals, without providing specific details regarding national security concerns.
Anthropic said it believes the government has ways to circumvent, or “jailbreak”, safeguards that prevent Fable 5 from being used to identify software vulnerabilities.
The order comes just as earlier disputes between Trump administration officials and Anthropic, which is pursuing an IPO, were showing signs of easing across branches of the U.S. government.
Anthropic’s relationship with the government was severed this year after the government refused to allow the U.S. military to use its AI models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems. The government has responded by placing Anthropic on a supply chain blacklist, which is expected to come into effect later this year.
read moreStreamlining the kill chain: How AI is changing modern warfare
The action also marks a significant escalation in U.S. efforts to thwart the AI capabilities of foreign adversaries. For years, U.S. export controls have focused on chips and tools that provide power.
It’s about AI, not restricting foreign access to AI itself.
Mr Antropik said the government had only given “oral evidence of a limited and non-universal escape possibility”.
“We do not agree that the discovery of a narrow jailbreak possibility should be cause for a recall of a commercial model that has been deployed to hundreds of millions of people,” the company said in a statement.
The government directive and Anthropic’s response highlight growing tensions between AI developers and regulators over how to assess risks from so-called “jailbreaking,” or methods used to circumvent safety measures in models.
As recently as Wednesday, Anthropic was calling for increased U.S. oversight of AI, including the ability to block models with unacceptable risks. But it said the government’s actions on Friday did not follow the principles of fair and fact-based regulation.
It appears that one of your browser extensions is blocking the video player from loading. To view this content, you may need to disable content on this site.
Cover image: BUSINESS © FRANCE 24
Kirsten Davis, the Pentagon’s chief intelligence officer, said in a post on X that the Pentagon supports prioritizing national security.
“Sometimes it’s simply more important than revenue cycles, clickbait and pre-IPO valuations. America first. Always,” Davis said.
Anthropic secretly filed for a U.S. IPO last month, leading rival OpenAI in the race to enter the public market.
advanced cyber attack
Earlier this week, Anthropic unveiled an AI model named Claude Fable 5 that represents a new layer of functionality that the company calls the “Mythos Class.” The model comes with guardrails that prohibit its use in dangerous areas such as cybersecurity, and some users have complained that it’s “too broad,” Anthropic said.
In the wrong hands, experts say the Mythos model could dramatically accelerate sophisticated cyberattacks, especially in sectors such as banking that rely on complex, interconnected, and often decades-old technology systems.
Anthropic said it worked with the U.S. government and others on safety ahead of Fable’s launch, and that models from competing AI providers have shown similar ability to find minor bugs in code.
“The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models is unaffected,” Anthropic said.
read moreWhat Palantir CEO’s Manifesto Says About the Changing Face of War
Anthropic said it believes there was a “misunderstanding” and is working to restore access to the model as soon as possible.
“We believe that if this standard were applied industry-wide, it would effectively halt all new model deployments for all Frontier model providers,” the company said.
Amazon’s cloud arm AWS announced late Friday that Anthropic had requested that it revoke access to the model for “all users in all regions.”
U.S. officials have confirmed that the Department of Commerce has issued an export control order that halts all foreign access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
Dean Ball, a former White House official who contributed to the administration’s AI Action Plan released in the summer of 2025, said in a post on
“This means you need to be prepared to need to prove your citizenship to use the human model,” Ball said. Several of anthropology’s leading figures were born outside the United States, including co-founder Chris Oller, AI researcher Andrei Karpathy, and philosopher Amanda Askell.
Reuters was unable to determine their citizenship status, and an Antropic spokesperson declined to comment on whether such staff would lose access to the AI model.
(France 24th Reuters)
