Anthropic Cuts Off Access to Two New AI Models After U.S. Export Order

Anthropic said on Friday that it suspended access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 artificial intelligence models to comply with a U.S. government export-control order issued under national security authority. According to CNBC, the company received the directive at 5:21 p.m. Eastern time and was told to halt access for any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including Anthropic’s foreign employees.

The company immediately disabled the models for all customers to ensure compliance, while saying its other models were unaffected. The move came only days after Anthropic unveiled Fable 5 and Mythos 5, which it described as leading the industry across a broad set of performance benchmarks. Fable 5 was especially notable as the first time Anthropic released such an advanced public product, using new safeguards designed to block responses in certain high-risk areas.

The new models followed the earlier launch of Claude Mythos Preview, which drew attention from Wall Street and U.S. officials in April because of its advanced cyber capabilities. Anthropic said it never intended to make that model broadly available and had limited distribution to a small group of companies through a cyber initiative called Project Glasswing. In its statement, Anthropic said the government gave no specific explanation for the security concern behind the order.

The company apologized for the disruption and said, “As we have publicly stated, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear and based on technical facts. This action does not meet those principles.” The episode adds to an ongoing dispute between Anthropic and the U.S. government, following a public clash earlier this year with the Pentagon. After negotiations broke down, the Defense Department labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” a designation usually reserved for foreign U.S. rivals, and required defense contractors to certify they would not use Anthropic’s Claude models in work with the military. Anthropic has sued the Trump administration to try to remove that blacklisting, and the case is still ongoing.