Why the US government shut down Anthropic’s latest Claude AI model
Why the US government shut down Anthropic’s latest Claude AI model
https://theconversation.com/why-the-us-government-shut-down-anthropics-latest-claude-ai-model-285223
Publish Date: 2026-06-15 00:08:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
On June 12, artificial intelligence (AI) lab Anthropic suspended access to its latest Claude models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, which had been released three days earlier.
The move came in response to an “export control directive” from the US government prohibiting use of the models by anyone who is not a US national.
Mythos is Anthropic’s most powerful, or “frontier”, model. When first announcing the model in April, the company said it was too good at hacking to release immediately. Instead, Mythos was made available to a handful of organisations (mostly US tech corporations) to use to patch weaknesses in essential digital systems.
Fable is the same basic model, but with added safeguards meant to stop it being used for cybersecurity purposes. This is what was released to the public last week – and almost immediately shut down.
Anthropic and the Trump administration at loggerheads
Since early 2025, Anthropic and the Trump administration have been in escalating conflict. The administration has accused Anthropic of making “woke AI” and called chief executive Dario Amodei an “ideological lunatic”.
Early disagreements concerned AI regulation and semiconductor export policy. The dispute sharpened when Anthropic declined to let the Pentagon use its models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems.
The Department of Defense responded by threatening to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a classification that would have required military contractors to sever ties.
Jailbreaks
The US government has not yet publicly stated the reason for last week’s directive, but Anthropic it says it believes the government became aware of a jailbreak: a method for circumventing the safeguards in Fable that prevent using its most powerful features for nefarious purposes.
These safeguards classify user requests as safe or unsafe before passing them to the AI model. When triggered, the safeguards redirect the request…
