As Anthropic execs prepare to visit the White House after effectively being ordered to cease offering the company's Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, the European Commission says the incident is another example of why the EU must achieve technological autonomy.Anthropic announced on Friday that the US government issued an export control directive that required the AI upstart to prevent any non-US citizens from accessing its cybersecurity models Mythos 5 and Fable 5.The order meant even some Anthropic staff could not use its models. And as there’s no way to tell if someone on the internet is a US citizen, the order effectively meant that the AI company had to stop making the models available to everyone to ensure compliance.
Anthropic isn't sure why the White House issued the order.
"Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or 'jailbreaking,' Fable 5," the company said. "To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws."Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government."The Wall Street Journal reports that the directive was the result of conversations held between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and US officials, including Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, and Jassy's report of a possible jailbreak. Anthropic executives are set to meet with US officials at the White House this week to gain a fuller understanding of the developments that informed the directive, according to Axios.Whatever the Trump administration's reason for the order, Mythos and Fable remain unavailable at the time of writing.A case study for sovereigntyThe incident has not gone unnoticed.Thomas Regnier, spokesperson for the European Commission, said the body is still examining the directive's implications for the EU amid concerns that the US can switch off access to technology that allied partners could soon come to rely on heavily."The Commission has taken note of Anthropic's statement regarding the US export control directive on its most advanced models and is assessing its implications, including for users in the European Union," he said.
