Anthropic suspends top AI models after U.S. export control order

Source Domain: www.nextgov.com

The Trump administration has ordered Anthropic to restrict foreign national access to two of its most advanced artificial intelligence models, prompting the company to disable the systems for all customers and escalating a fight over how Washington should control frontier AI tools with powerful cybersecurity capabilities.

Anthropic said Friday evening that the U.S. issued an export control directive suspending access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, including foreign nationals inside the United States and foreign national employees of the company. Anthropic said the order effectively forces it to abruptly disable both models for all customers while it works to comply, though the directive will not affect access to its other models.

The order marks one of the administration’s most aggressive steps yet to control access to frontier AI models, and significantly increases tensions with Anthropic, which has become a darling in Washington policy circles for its often public commitments to AI safety.

The move appears to stem from concerns about a possible jailbreak of Anthropic’s systems. Axios reported Friday evening that the Commerce Department acted after another company claimed it had jailbroken Mythos, alarming officials about potential national security risks. Anthropic in a blog post pushed back on the government’s rationale, saying the concern involved a narrow potential issue and did not justify pulling access to the models broadly.

“To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws,” Anthropic wrote in a statement on the order. “Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from…

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