The U.S. government instructed Anthropic to prevent any foreign national from accessing the AI company\u2019s latest and most powerful models Friday evening, according to the AI giant.<\/p>\n
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Anthropic, the company behind the popular Claude chatbot, said this directive forced it to disable access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all customers \u2014 not just foreign nationals \u2014 to comply with the directive.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees,\u201d the company wrote in a statement posted online<\/a> late Friday evening. <\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s decision to suspend user access appears to be the first time a leading AI company has taken a publicly deployed model offline due to intervention from the federal government.<\/p>\n \u201cThe net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance,\u201d the company wrote. <\/p>\n Claude\u2019s landing page said that \u201cFable 5 is temporarily unavailable\u201d as of Friday evening.<\/p>\n The letter issuing the directive was sent from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and was written with the help of officials from the Commerce Department\u2019s Bureau of Industry and Security, according to an administration official.<\/p>\n The Commerce Department did not immediately reply to a request for comment.<\/p>\n In its statement, Anthropic said the government had identified a specific technique that could allow users to circumvent some narrow safeguards for Fable 5. It was unclear Friday night why the Commerce Department was specifically worried about foreign nationals exploiting this weakness, or \u201cjailbreak.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic also said the government had only provided \u201cverbal evidence\u201d of the issue and said the workaround was likely also present in AI systems developed by other companies. <\/p>\n \u201cWe disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people,\u201d the company said in its statement<\/p>\n Anthropic released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on Tuesday<\/a>, trumpeting the new models as the most powerful AI systems it had ever shared. The company said that these AI models are powerful enough to merit strict safety guardrails to prevent malicious or dangerous use.<\/p>\n \u201cReleasing a model this capable comes with risks. Without safeguards, Fable 5\u2019s capabilities in areas like cybersecurity could be misused to cause serious damage,\u201d Anthropic said in its Tuesday announcement<\/a>.<\/p>\n While both models were built on the same technical foundation, only Fable 5 was released to the general public. The Fable model includes much stronger restrictions on the types of questions that users can ask, especially on issues related to cybersecurity and biology. Mythos 5, meanwhile, was released without such safeguards to a select group of trusted partners, including key cybersecurity and infrastructure companies.<\/p>\n Anthropic said it believed Friday\u2019s directive stemmed from \u201ca misunderstanding\u201d and hoped to reinstate access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as soon as possible. <\/p>\n Friday\u2019s directive is the latest development in a tumultuous relationship between Anthropic and the federal government. In February, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved to bar Anthropic\u2019s products from federal agencies after the company sought stronger guardrails on how the Pentagon used its technology. At the time, Trump posted on Truth Social<\/a> that \u201cThe Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War.\u201d <\/p>\n Anthropic later sued the administration<\/a>, arguing that the administration\u2019s violated Anthropic\u2019s freedom of speech. A federal judge in California ruled in Anthropic\u2019s favor<\/a>, but the case remains active in a Washington, D.C. federal court.<\/p>\n Despite the dispute, Anthropic and the administration had seemed to make amends in recent weeks. Last week, the Financial Times reported<\/a> that the National Security Agency was using Mythos to conduct offensive cyberattacks. <\/p>\n