The Trump administration has established a new precedent: you need the government’s permission to release a frontier AI model.
On Friday evening, the Commerce Department “issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees,” according to Anthropic.
“The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.”
The move came after the administration “tried to get Anthropic to pause releasing the latest models but was unsuccessful,” Axios reported one official saying. The government appears to have been spooked by a jailbreak, which it believes could let non-approved users access Fable’s powerful cyber capabilities.
“The model needs to remain locked down until the US government’s national security apparatus is hardened, the official said, adding that could happen in the next few weeks,” according to Axios.
