Anthropic suspends new AI models after government directive

The U.S. government instructed Anthropic to prevent any foreign national from accessing the AI company’s latest and most powerful models Friday evening, according to the company.

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Anthropic, the company behind the popular Claude chatbot, said this directive forced it to disable access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all customers — not just foreign nationals — to comply with the directive.

“The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees,” the company wrote in a statement posted online late Friday evening.

The letter issuing the directive was sent from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and was written with the help of officials from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, according to an administration official.

Anthropic released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on Tuesday , trumpeting the new models as the most powerful AI systems it had ever shared. The company said that these AI models are powerful enough to merit strict safety guardrails to prevent malicious or dangerous use.

“Releasing a model this capable comes with risks. Without safeguards, Fable 5’s capabilities in areas like cybersecurity could be misused to cause serious damage,” Anthropic said in its Tuesday announcement .

While both models were built on the same technical foundation, only Fable 5 was released to the general public. The Fable model includes much stronger restrictions on the types of questions that users can ask, especially on issues related to cybersecurity and biology. Mythos 5, meanwhile, was released without such safeguards to a select group of trusted partners, including key cybersecurity and infrastructure companies.