US suspends foreign access to Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 amid security concern

In a major development, the US government has issued an export control directive ordering leading AI company, Anthropic, to cut off all foreign national access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models, forcing the company to disable the products entirely to ensure compliance.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Friday directing that Mythos 5 and Fable 5 be subjected to export controls covering any location outside the US and all foreign persons within the country. The letter was written with input from officials at the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security.

Anthropic said it received the directive at 5:21 p.m. ET. “The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance,” the company wrote in a statement.

The company said the letter did not spell out the specific national security concern behind the order. “Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5,” the statement reads. Anthropic said it believes there is a “misunderstanding” and that it is working to restore access to both models as soon as possible. Access to other Anthropic models will not be affected by the directive.

The order covers foreign nationals both inside and outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. Anthropic had previously described Fable 5 as “too powerful.”

The directive arrives days after the launch of Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Mythos 5 uses the same underlying model as Fable 5 but operates with safeguards lifted in certain areas.

This comes against the backdrop of Anthropic and the US government also involved in a separate lawsuit over an order to stop government agencies from using the company’s AI tools.