The administration of US President Donald Trump has barred foreigners from accessing the top AI models developed by Anthropic, citing national security concerns, underscoring the US government’s policy of export controls over advanced technology.
The United States’ measures come less than a week after Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, rolled out a new artificial intelligence (AI) model named Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
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“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,” Anthropic said in a blog post on Friday.
The latest move has reignited the feud between Anthropic and the Trump administration. The San Francisco-based company is suing the administration after it was put on a supply chain blacklist for its refusal to allow the US military to use its AI models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems.
Will this new US order further rupture ties between the White House and the AI firm?
Here’s what we know:
What’s behind the US order?
Anthropic said the US government gave the company an order citing national security concerns, but did not specify further details.
According to a June 14 article by US news outlet Semafor, the order was issued partly over suspicions that a China-linked group had accessed Anthopic’s new AI model.
China has made big strides in the AI in recent years, with Chinese AI firm DeepSeek releasing generative AI models DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 using a fraction of cost compared to its American counterparts. Beijing also monopolises rare earth supply chains, which are critical to the AI sector.
Semafor noted that David Sacks, an adviser to President Trump, revealed in a post on X how the government found out about security issues with Anthropic’s AI model, which led to the export control order.
The government received a warning that Fable 5 could be jailbroken, Sachs said, adding that when Anthopic’s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei was notified, the company did nothing to fix it.
In its blog post on Friday, Anthropic said the US government had given it only “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak”.
“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,” the company said.
The Pentagon’s chief information officer, Kirsten Davies, said in a post on X on June 13 that the US Defense Department supported prioritising national security.
“Some things are simply more important than revenue cycles, clickbait, and pre-IPO valuation. America First. Always,” Davies said.
Al Jazeera, however, could not independently confirm the veracity of the media reports.
What are the AI models that will be affected?
Anthropic’s Fable 5 model, released earlier this week and based on Mythos technology, is blocked due to the US government order.
Experts have told the Reuters news agency that Mythos models, in the wrong hands, could dramatically accelerate sophisticated cyberattacks, particularly in sectors such as banking that rely on complex, interconnected, and often decades-old technology systems.
Anthropic said earlier this week that it had worked with the US government, among others, on safety ahead of the Fable launch and that models from rival AI providers showed a similar ability to unearth minor bugs in code.
Other major AI developers, such as OpenAI, have also developed similar AI models but have generally avoided such strict direct restrictions from the Trump administration.
Commenting on the latest order from the US government, Anthropic said on Friday: “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.”
How will the US order impact global research and foreign workers?
The latest measures aim to decide who can use software developed in the US and are part of the Trump administration’s policy of export control over high technology, especially in critical sectors such as AI and semiconductors. The US government has previously imposed restrictions and regulations on the sale of chips by tech giants such as Nvidia and AMD.
The latest order could be detrimental to global research and development as research institutions, including foreign ones that collaborate with the US firm, will lose access to such cutting-edge technology.
Currently, many global companies like equity and research firm S&P use Anthropic’s Claude software to integrate their databases. This, in turn, helps financial advisers, investors and financial analysts access data from S&P in an efficient manner.
Besides companies, foreigners working in the US on H1-B visas as well as people living outside the US will not be able to access Anthropic’s new advanced AI model.
Meanwhile, several key Anthropic personnel, including co-founder Chris Olah, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and philosopher Amanda Askell, were born outside the US. But it is unclear whether they will also lose access to the software.
The move will also impact the workflow and productivity of companies in the US that use Anthropic, analysts say, with some employees unable to use the AI firm’s advanced software.
Some users on X have shared more ramifications.
Kun Chen, an X user who is a member of the tech community and a former L8 engineer at Meta, Microsoft, and Atlassian, said the US government has made a mistake with this order.
“Using ‘foreign national’ as the criteria to gate the model is just not very smart. It’s clearly not enforceable in practice and would obviously lead to a wide ban. And it’s also pretty useless – there are plenty of Americans more hostile towards the US than foreigners… and it’s also easy to bypass by people with real malicious intent,” he said.
Sridhar Vembu, the co-founder of the Indian multinational company Zoho, said on X that this US order has shown that “technology is the ultimate weapon”.
“National sovereignty, national security, all of it is now about technology,” he said.
Vembu also emphasised that it is a chance for countries like India to improve their own AI.
Meanwhile, Anthropic has said that it believed there was a “misunderstanding” and that it is working to restore access to the models as soon as possible.