Welp, it was nice while it lasted. Anthropic said Friday that it will “immediately suspend” access to its latest Mythos 5 and Fable 5 AI models under orders from the U.S. government. Access to other models is not affected, and the company said it's working to "restore access as soon as possible."
A directive from the White House issued at 5:21 p.m. ET on Friday required the company to revoke access to its next-gen models for "any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees," Anthropic explained in a blog post. With no way of applying that rule at the moment, Anthropic abruptly disabled the models for all of its customers to ensure compliance.
The unexpected move comes just days after Anthropic unveiled Fable 5 and Mythos 5, touting them as cutting-edge AI models that set new performance standards across a range of industry benchmarks. Fable 5 is especially notable because it marks the first time Anthropic released such an advanced model to the public, owing to new safety measures designed to block responses in certain high-risk areas that the company developing working closely with authorities in the US and the UK. Fable's safeguards are "substantially more effective than those of any previously deployed model" according to the company.
A matter of national security?
The Trump administration cited national security concerns with giving specific details beyond "verbal evidence" of a potential jailbreak. Anthropic said it believes the government is concerned there's a way to bypass one of Fable 5’s safety safeguards to prevent it from being used to identify software vulnerabilities.
"We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people," the company said. "If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers."
Notably, Anthropic and the Trump administration haven't been on great terms since the company refused to let the U.S. military use its AI models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems earlier this year. In response, the government put Anthropic on a supply chain blacklist that's set to take effect later this year.
The Pentagon's chief information officer, Kirsten Davies, said in a post on X that the Defense Department is prioritizing national security in its decision: "Some things are simply more important than revenue cycles, clickbait, and pre-IPO valuation. America First. Always."
The tech world reacts
In this latest skirmish in the hostilities between the White House and Anthropic, users are the ones getting caught in the crossfire. On Reddit, users decried the government's directive as short-sighted and impossible to implement in practice.
"Sounds like something that would make sense only to a boomer that has no understanding of how internet works," one user wrote. Others implied that an Open AI executive called in a favor to get Anthropic's latest model pulled, citing the $25 million gift OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman gave Trump's super PAC back in January.
Over on X, Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, called the move "cartoonish" and "baffling."
"An administration whose posture is that we *should* export advanced AI chips to China, which also wants to ban… Britain (and every other non-American on Earth)… from using our best models? I have no words," he wrote. The order suggests all "non-Americans" would be restricted from using the company's latest models, including those based in the U.S.
"This means you should expect to have to prove your citizenship to use Anthropic models," Ball said.
CEO of AI firm Every Dan Shipper suggested the ban could lift in a few days, and ultimately increase demand for Fable by extension. In other words, it's a glorified marketing stunt. Thought that doesn't detract from the disturbing precedent it sits: "this kind of thing is extremely disruptive and distracting for people inside of the company. The only comparable scenario I can remember is Sam Altman's firing which was resolved relatively quickly. Even though things went back to the way they were, I do think that disrupted their momentum for a while," he wrote.
There's plenty of speculation circulating about what this means for the future of other AI models, including those from outside the U.S. and particularly China.
More from Tom's Guide
- 'No action is too extreme when the fate of humanity is at stake!' — Anthropic CEO and others are pushing for safety measures against their own technology
- Claude Fable 5 is here — and it's based on a model Anthropic once deemed too risky for the public
- Anthropic just filed for IPO — 5 things you need to know
