White House forces Anthropic to disable new frontier models following abrupt export ban
Anthropic PBC was forced just to abruptly pull the plug on foreign access to two of its most powerful artificial intelligence models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, just days after it launched them.
The sudden decision just before the weekend to do so came shortly after the U.S. Commerce Department issued a sweeping export control order citing urgent security concerns over the models.
The Commerce Department order explicitly bans all “foreign nationals,” including those of allied nations and Anthropic’s own foreign employees from accessing the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. Because of the difficulty in restricting usage based on nationality alone, Anthropic responded in the only way it could – by disabling access globally to ensure it could comply with the order.
In a statement on X, Anthropic said the order came following a “misunderstanding” by U.S. national security authorities over the risks of the new models. It explained that government officials had provided it with “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jalbreak.”
