Anthropic this week launched its much-anticipated Claude Fables, a safety-focused model built on Claude Mythos. However, in a blog post published on Friday, the company said it had been instructed by the US government to revoke access to its most advanced AI models for certain foreign users and to suspend access more broadly. Reports indicate that the decision followed a call from a technology industry executive to senior US officials, triggering a government crackdown on Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and Claude Fable models. The current crackdown from the government has shown increasing conflict between AI, national security, and politics. It has also raised questions about who should decide when an advanced AI system is too dangerous to share, as governments and tech companies race to stay ahead in this fast-changing field.
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told administration officials that company researchers had managed to get Anthropic’s Fable 5 model to provide information that could potentially aid cyberattacks through a series of prompts. The findings were shared with officials including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, prompting discussions inside the White House about possible responses.
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The report said security researchers later examined Amazon’s claims, and officials concluded that restricting access for foreign governments, companies and individuals was the quickest way to address the perceived risk. President Donald Trump reportedly approved the action despite concerns that such a move could hurt American competitiveness in AI.
Anthropic has pushed back against the government’s assessment. The company argues that the information highlighted by Amazon involves relatively basic software vulnerabilities that can also be identified using other publicly available AI models. It also disputes suggestions that the issue represented a complete bypass of the model’s safety protections.
Some cybersecurity experts familiar with the research have expressed similar views. They say the reported findings did not demonstrate access to the most sensitive capabilities of the model, including tools that could generate working exploit code for attacks.
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The situation has also revived long-running tensions between Anthropic and the Trump administration. The company has previously clashed with government officials over AI policy and military use of its technology. Critics of the latest decision argue that politics may have played a role alongside security concerns.
Rumours about Anthropic exploring a public listing in the coming months have been going around for a while. However, the restrictions on the AI models could have significant business consequences for the company, as customers can weigh alternative AI providers like OpenAI or Google.