WASHINGTON—On July 1, Anthropic restored global access to its Fable 5 model, nineteen days after the US Commerce Department had ordered it shut off. The episode exposed a gap in US artificial intelligence (AI) policy: The United States has no clear, public process for restricting access to a privately developed AI model. The current administration could begin closing that gap quickly through executive measures, and it should, but executive measures can be undone as easily as they are made. The durable solution here is one that binds the next administration as well as this one, through congressional legislation. Until Congress acts, the lesson for American AI developers is that their flagship products can be suspended with little warning, under criteria the public has never seen, through a process that occurs entirely behind closed doors.
The story behind the restrictions on Fable 5
The administration’s order to shut down Fable 5 cut against the administration’s own stated approach. In a June 2 executive order, US President Donald Trump directed agencies to build a framework, due August 1, under which AI companies could voluntarily share their most advanced models with the government for pre-release review. Ten days later, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) reached instead for export controls to shut down access to Fable 5. Regulating software exports is not new for the BIS, which has export-controlled encryption tools and dual-use defense software for decades. It has stretched those tools toward surveillance vendors before, and it enforces the semiconductor controls on China. This time, it ordered Anthropic to cut off Fable 5 and its restricted counterpart, Mythos 5, for all foreign nationals, including Anthropic’s own employees, reportedly with as little as ninety minutes to comply. Anthropic said it had “no reliable way to verify nationality in real-time,” so it suspended both models for all users that evening, and no specific threat was publicly disclosed. A senior White House official anonymously told Politico that export controls were “a last resort after begging them for hours to work with us.”
