The extraordinary move by the US to bar foreign access to Anthropic PBC’s best AI models underscores the Trump administration’s newfound willingness to exert control over a pivotal industry. It also reminds Silicon Valley that it’s working with an imperfectly understood technology with uncertain impact.
Washington has taken the unprecedented step of ordering the AI startup to disable access to its most advanced AI platforms for all foreign nationals. The US government issued the order after discovering it’s possible to “jailbreak,” or bypass the guardrails, of the Fable 5 AI model Anthropic released just days prior. The swiftness of the move triggered widespread concern over what the startup called a “disproportionate” response — and a warning that such an approach could “halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”
