Anthropic pulls Mythos and Fable 5 AI models as White House bans all foreign access

Anthropic said it is complying with a Trump administration directive to suspend foreign nationals from access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, and is subsequently disabling the tools for all users including those in the US.

“The 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,” the company said in a .

The directive, which Anthropic said it received at 5:21 pm Friday, marks the most significant action yet by the Trump administration to place export restrictions on cutting-edge models. That’s despite earlier statements, including in an executive order, that the US would not be imposing a licensing regime for model reviews. A US official confirmed the Commerce Department sent the letter.

Friday’s directive adds to pressure that Anthropic specifically is facing from the US government. Earlier this year, the Pentagon labelled the company a supply chain risk after a protracted contracting dispute over guardrails the company insisted on spelling out.

The restriction could also risk stymieing the growth of Anthropic, one of the country’s most valuable startups and which is expected to head for an initial public offering in coming months.

The directive did not provide specific details of the government’s national security concern, Anthropic said.

“Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or jailbreaking Fable 5,” it said.

“However, 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.”

Privately-held Anthropic, which has long positioned itself as a more responsible AI developer, first released its Mythos model in April to a limited group of business and government partners, while warning of its abilities to find cybersecurity bugs. This week, it released a public-facing version - Fable 5 - with significant guardrails designed to prevent customers from deploying it for potentially dangerous cyber or biology uses.

The Mythos release accelerated the Trump administration’s efforts on AI policy, including a recent executive order that called for voluntary model review. That order explicitly said that nothing in it should be construed as creating a mandatory licensing regime.

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