Washington Orders Anthropic to Cut Off Foreign Access to Its Top AI Models

The United States government has ordered the artificial-intelligence company Anthropic to block all foreign nationals from using its most advanced models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, on national-security grounds. The company said it received an export-control directive and responded by disabling customer access to both models entirely while it sought to comply.

The order applies to any foreign national inside or outside the country, including Anthropic's own foreign employees, according to Deutsche Welle. The government's stated concern, conveyed largely as verbal evidence, is that a safeguard meant to stop Fable 5 from helping identify software vulnerabilities can be bypassed, and that the same weakness likely exists in rival systems.

Anthropic disputed the action, warning that recalling a model used by hundreds of millions of people over a narrow potential jailbreak, if applied across the industry, would halt new model deployments by every frontier developer. The measure is the first United States export control directed at named artificial-intelligence models rather than chips or code.