Anthropic said Friday evening that the U.S. government issued an export control directive suspending access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, including foreign nationals within the U.S. and foreign national employees of the company. According to Nextgov/FCW. The directive effectively forces the company to disable both models for all customers while it works to comply, though access to other models remains unaffected.

Concerns Over AI Model Vulnerabilities

The order marks one of the administration’s most aggressive steps to control access to frontier AI models. According to Nextgov/FCW, the move stems from concerns about a possible jailbreak of Anthropic’s systems. Axios reported that the Commerce Department acted after another company claimed it had jailbroken Mythos 5, alarming officials about potential national security risks.

Anthropic pushed back on the government’s rationale, stating the concern involved a narrow potential issue and did not justify pulling access to the models broadly. In a blog post, Anthropic wrote, “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.”

Company Response and Precautions

AOL.com reported that Anthropic said U.S. national security authorities had not identified specific concerns. The company stated, “Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5.” Jailbreaking refers to circumventing software restrictions designed to protect cyber networks, allowing hackers to access sensitive information or unblock features.

Anthropic said it reviewed a demonstration of this technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. The company added that these vulnerabilities appeared relatively simple and that other publicly available models could discover them without requiring a bypass. Ahead of the release of Claude Fable 5, Anthropic touted various safeguards to prevent cyber hacking.

Finance, technology, and government leaders had expressed concerns about the public rollout of the tool, following a private release in April for previewing and testing vulnerabilities within its own system. Anthropic enabled pre-release access for a handful of organizations because the tool was so intelligent that it could be dangerous due to its ability to exploit or hack computer systems.

Legal Tensions and Public Perception

According to AOL.com, Anthropic and the Trump administration are involved in a separate ongoing lawsuit over an order to stop government agencies from using the company’s AI tools. The BBC has approached the U.S. Department of Commerce for comment.

Anthropic self-proclaimed that it was “too powerful to release” before Claude Fable 5 was publicly released, a claim some critics questioned as inflated hype and marketing spin. The company’s public rollout came amid heightened scrutiny, particularly in Washington policy circles, where Anthropic has become a favorite for its often public commitments to AI safety.