Anthropic's Top AI Scientist Locked Out of His Own Company's Most Powerful AI Because He's Not American

Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 launched on 9 June and went dark three days later under a US Commerce Department export directive (Credit: X/@nikkeibpITpro)

Andrej Karpathy, one of the most respected researchers in artificial intelligence (AI), recently became the face of a massive tech-regulation scare at Anthropic. Rumors claimed he couldn't access his own work. The blamed culprit wasn't seniority, but his passport.

The panic started on Friday when the US Commerce Department issued a sudden export control directive. It banned foreign nationals from accessing Anthropic's two newest models, Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. However, Karpathy holds an EB-1 green card, making him a "US person" exempt from the ban.