Washington Orders Anthropic to Cut Foreign Access to Two Top Models, Citing a Narrow Jailbreak

The United States government issued an export-control directive instructing Anthropic to suspend all access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the country, including Anthropic's own foreign-national employees, the company disclosed. To comply, Anthropic disabled both models worldwide for every customer while leaving its other models running.

According to Anthropic, the government's stated concern is a method of bypassing Fable 5's safeguards. The company says it received only verbal evidence of a narrow, non-universal method that amounts to asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix software flaws in it, as reported by CNBC. Anthropic argues that recalling a commercial model used by hundreds of millions of people over a narrow flaw would, if applied across the industry, halt all frontier deployments, and it says it is working to restore access.

The episode marks a shift in how export controls operate. Earlier restrictions targeted hardware, most notably advanced accelerator chips. This directive treats access to a deployed model as the controlled item and reaches foreign nationals on US soil, a scope that legal and security analysts flagged as novel. The government has not published its full technical rationale, so the public record rests on Anthropic's account of a verbal briefing.