For the first time, the United States government has switched off frontier artificial intelligence and forced the world to go without it. Two of the most capable AI systems ever built, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, went dark last week. Not just in China or Iran. A researcher in London, a developer in Tokyo, an entire company in Berlin, all cut off at once, all treated as equally dangerous.
A letter reached Anthropic at 5.21 on a Friday afternoon from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, citing national security authorities. It told the company to suspend access for every foreign national, anywhere in the world. There is no switch that lets in Americans and keeps out everyone else. To comply, Anthropic said it had to take the models down for all users at once.
On a commercial chatbot, America’s allies were handed the same blackout as China, an authoritarian rival
The precedent should alarm anyone who believes a serious government acts through evidence and law, not panic. Strip away the national security language and we are left with a new and dangerous precedent – the government’s conviction that it can switch off all software, anywhere, by writing a letter.
I have spent a career on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and as a correspondent who covered China, arguing that the West is too casual about handing its hardest technology to its adversaries. I take the cyber risk of these models seriously.
