Anthropic Disables AI Models Following U.S. Government Directive

Anthropic on Friday announced it's disabled access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 artificial intelligence models to comply with an export control directive from the U.S. government that cited "national security authorities."

The company said it received an order at 5:21 p.m. ET, instructing it to suspend all access to the models "by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees."

Anthropic abruptly disabled the models for all of its customers in order to ensure compliance, but said all of its other models will not be affected.

The unexpected move comes just days after Anthropic announced Fable 5 and Mythos 5, two powerful models that the company touted as state-of-the-art across a number of different industry benchmarks. Fable 5, in particular, marked the first time that Anthropic released such an advanced offering to the public, thanks to new safeguards that block responses in specific high-risk areas.

The models built on the release of Claude Mythos Preview, which captivated Wall Street and government officials with its advanced cybersecurity capabilities in April. The company said it did not plan to make the model generally available, and it has limited the rollout to a select group of companies as part of a cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing.

In its statement on Friday, Anthropic said the government did not provide specific details about its national security concern. The company apologized to its customers for the disruption.

"As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts," Anthropic said. "This action does not adhere to those principles."

The announcement marks Anthropic's latest run-in with the U.S. government after a high-profile clash with the Department of Defense spilled into public view earlier this year.

After negotiations between the two organizations collapsed, the DOD declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, meaning the company purportedly threatens U.S. national security. The label has historically been reserved for foreign adversaries, and requires defense contractors to certify that they will not use Anthropic's Claude models in their work with the military.

Anthropic sued the Trump administration in an effort to reverse its blacklisting, and litigation is still ongoing.