The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has issued an order prohibiting foreign nationals from accessing the leading artificial intelligence models developed by Anthropic, citing national security concerns. The move comes less than a week after the San Francisco-based company, creator of the Claude chatbot, launched its new AI models named Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
“The U.S. government, citing national security authority, has issued an export control directive suspending all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign employees of Anthropic,” Anthropic said in a blog post on Friday.
The order has reignited the conflict between Anthropic and the Trump administration. The company is suing the administration after being placed on a supply chain blacklist for refusing to allow the U.S. military to use its AI models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
According to a June 14 report by U.S. news outlet Semafor, the directive was issued in part due to suspicions that a China-linked group accessed Anthropic's new AI model. David Sacks, an advisor to President Trump, revealed in a post on X that the government had received warnings that Fable 5 could be “jailbroken” and that when CEO Dario Amodei was notified, the company did not fix the issue. Anthropic insisted it received only “verbal evidence of a narrow, not widespread, jailbreak vulnerability” and argued this was insufficient grounds to recall a commercial model deployed to millions of users.
Pentagon Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies shared on X: “Some things are more important than the revenue cycle, view counts, and pre-IPO valuations. America first. Always.”
Experts say the Mythos models, if they fall into the wrong hands, could significantly accelerate sophisticated cyberattacks, especially in sectors like banking that rely on complex and legacy technology systems. Anthropic noted it worked with the U.S. government and other parties on safety before launching Fable, and that models from rival AI providers demonstrate similar capabilities in detecting minor bugs in code.
According to Anthropic, “The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will remain unaffected.”
These latest measures are aimed at controlling who can use software developed in the United States and are part of the Trump administration's policy of export controls on high technology, particularly in critical areas such as AI and semiconductors. The directive could hamper global research and development as foreign research institutions lose access to advanced technology. Many global companies, such as S&P, use Anthropic's Claude software to integrate databases and support financial professionals. Foreign nationals working in the U.S. on H-1B visas, as well as those living outside the U.S., will be unable to access these new AI models.
Some X users have highlighted the broader implications. Kun Chen, a former engineer at Meta, Microsoft, and Atlassian, called the order “not smart” and “unenforceable in practice.” Sridhar Vembu, co-founder of India's Zoho Corporation, saw it as an opportunity for countries like India to improve their own AI, emphasizing that “technology is the ultimate weapon.”
Anthropic said there has been a “misunderstanding” and is working to restore access to the models as soon as possible.
