Trump Administration Orders Anthropic To Suspend Foreign Access To Fable 5 And Mythos 5

The Trump administration barred foreigners from accessing Anthropic’s top AI models, ordering the company “to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national,” a move Anthropic said it received citing national security authorities.

“Summoned by Washington to restrict access to its most advanced models by foreign nationals, Anthropic disabled them for all of its customers”

ActuIA

Anthropic said the directive’s practical effect was that it “must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance,” after the company said it could not reliably sort users by nationality in real time.

ActuIA

The order followed Anthropic’s rollout of Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and the dispute reignited after Anthropic was put on a supply chain blacklist for refusing to allow the US military to use its AI models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems.

The Commerce Department directive was described as a global kill switch, with Anthropic pulling both newest models for everyone within hours, and the company disabled access for all customers to comply with the ban.

The stakes were framed in terms of export controls over advanced technology, with the directive aimed at who can use software developed in the US and part of a broader policy of export control over high technology, especially in critical sectors such as AI and semiconductors.

Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security, said the security vulnerability that led to the export controls involved a simple technique using “three simple words: Fix this code.”

Moussouris wrote that when researchers asked Fable to “review the code for security issues” the model refused, but when they asked it to “fix this code,” the model produced patches.

Al Jazeera

The dispute over how serious the issue was also played out in competing accounts of what the government saw, with Anthropic saying the US government had only “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak.”

The Atlantic described the White House as deeming Fable 5 a threat to national security and reportedly giving Anthropic 90 minutes to take down Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after which the government issued an export control that prevented any foreign national from using Fable and Mythos.

In response to the directive, Anthropic said it had worked with the US government, among others, on safety ahead of the Fable launch, and that “The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.”

European Commission spokesperson for tech sovereignty Thomas Regnier said the export ban “should not be discriminatory,” arguing that contingency measures “should not be discriminatory against partners,” after the directive locked Europeans out of Anthropic’s top AI models.

“Anthropic staff met Monday with senior Trump administration officials for their first in-person sit-downs after a federally imposed export ban forced the artificial intelligence startup to pull its latest model from the market Friday night, two administration officials, a person familiar with the discussions and a person close to the company told POLITICO, which is — like Business Insider — part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network”

Business Insider

Regnier said the Commission was “looking closely at the practical consequences of this for European users of these services,” while also framing the episode as a shared challenge that raises cybersecurity concerns needing to be addressed.

The Conversation described the directive as an “export control directive” that prohibited use of the models by anyone who is not a US national, and said Anthropic suspended access to its latest Claude models after they were released three days earlier.

Lawfare said the episode marked the first time that export controls have been enforced to control access to an AI model, and warned that in the long term it could make it “very difficult for Anthropic and other frontier AI companies to secure the foreign talent that is key to AI's development.”

CNBC reported that senior Anthropic staffers were meeting with Trump administration officials in Washington, D.C., to try to resolve the dispute, after the export control directive ordered the company to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 “by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States.”