“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.”
Anthropic said Friday it has disabled access to two of its newest AI models after receiving a directive from the Trump admin citing national security concerns.
"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."
The move comes only days after Anthropic revealed its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 modes which it described as "state-of-the-art" systems across several industry benchmarks. Fable 5 was notable because it marked one of the first times the company released a model of that capability level to the public, relying on new safeguards designed to restrict responses in certain high-risk areas.
In a statement, Anthropic said federal officials did not provide details about the specific national security concerns behind the order. The company apologized to customers impacted by the sudden shutdown. "As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts," Anthropic said. "This action does not adhere to those principles."
After negotiations between the 2 organizations collapsed, the DOD declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, that meaning the company purportedly threatens US national security. The label has, historically been reserved for foreign adversaries, and requires defense contractors to certify that they will not use Anthropic’s Claude models in their work with the military.
Anthopic's full statement reads as follows:
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 net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.
We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.
Anthropic’s posture with respect to Fable’s safeguards, as laid out in our launch blog post, is the following:
We are complying with the government’s legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.
As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
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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. 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 other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe. We will share more details over the next 24 hours.