Research that caused the Commerce Department to impose strict limits on the use of Anthropic’s new AI models wasn’t geared toward offensive purposes, according to a cybersecurity CEO who saw the findings.
Late Friday, the department used national security export controls to bar the company from distributing Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
The directive applies to people outside the U.S. and foreign nationals in the U.S., including Anthropic’s own non-citizen employees. Due to the directive’s scope, Anthropic said it had no choice but to disable the models for all users.
The company said it was told that research on a “jailbreak” of Anthropic’s AI that sought to probe bypassing of safeguards sparked the export controls.
“We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post. “If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”
