Washington Orders Anthropic to Cut Foreign Access to Its Two Strongest Models

The US government, invoking national-security authorities, directed Anthropic to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States and including the company's own foreign-national employees. Anthropic says it received the order on June 12 and disabled the two models for all customers to comply. Its other models are unaffected.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick notified Chief Executive Dario Amodei by letter without detailing the specific concern. Anthropic's understanding is that the government believes someone found a way to jailbreak Fable 5, meaning a method to bypass its safety restrictions. The company says it disagrees that a narrow potential jailbreak justifies recalling a commercial model used by hundreds of millions, arguing that such a standard, applied across the industry, would halt new frontier-model deployments entirely.

The mechanism is the notable part. Export controls have governed chips and manufacturing tools for years. Applying them to access to a deployed model treats the model weights and serving endpoint as a controlled technology. That expansion of the category affects how every US lab handles non-citizen users and staff. The government's evidence has not been made public, and Anthropic's account is the only source for the jailbreak rationale, so the underlying security claim remains a claim rather than an independently verified fact.