Overview
- The Commerce Department issued an export-control directive that requires Anthropic to block access to its top models for foreign nationals, and Anthropic responded by disabling those models globally because it could not reliably limit access by nationality.
- U.S. officials cite a demonstrated jailbreak that they say can remove Fable 5’s safeguards and effectively expose the capabilities of the more powerful Mythos model, a finding reported to have been reviewed by the NSA.
- Anthropic disputes that the flaw fully nullifies its guardrails and has been negotiating with Commerce, White House advisers, and federal security teams to restore access, but talks have so far not lifted the restriction.
- The directive invokes long‑standing 'deemed export' rules, which treat sharing controlled technology with a foreign national inside the United States as an export and could force firms to block many foreign‑citizen employees from model access.
- The action has prompted debate in security and industry circles, prompted investors to reassess risk, and pushed some traders toward decentralized‑AI projects seen as less vulnerable to a single regulator’s shutdown.