Artificial intelligence developer Anthropic was reportedly given only 90 minutes by the Trump administration on Friday to remove its newly released and more advanced Mythos and Fable AI models before facing federal licensing restrictions, as per an Axios report on Saturday.
A source familiar with the topic told the website that government officials contacted Anthropic at 1 p.m. ET (5 p.m. GMT) and ordered the company to roll back the models, citing a "national security threat" without providing details.
The source said Anthropic had already completed pre-release testing with the government and had received approval to deploy Fable.
"We immediately sought to understand the specific nature of the threat so we could remediate it," said the source.
By 5.30 p.m. (10:30 p.m. GMT), the U.S. Commerce Department sent Anthropic a letter imposing controls on where the models could be used and by whom, prompting the company to begin withdrawing the systems, Axios reported.
