The U.S. government has ordered Anthropic to immediately cut off global access to its AI models Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns. The directive bans all access to these models by foreign nationals, both inside and outside the United States. Anthropic is complying with the order but has publicly expressed disagreement, calling the move a 'misunderstanding.' The company plans to share more details within 24 hours. The government claims a potential jailbreak could bypass Fable 5's safety guardrails, a claim Anthropic has disputed. The company reviewed the report behind the directive and concluded that the capabilities described are 'widely available from other models,' including OpenAI's GPT-5.5. Security researchers already use these capabilities daily to protect systems. Anthropic says it has tested the model for thousands of hours with the US government, the UK AI Safety Institute, and private organizations, and that its safety measures are 'substantially more effective than those of any previously deployed model.'
The potential jailbreak, so far only described verbally by the government, involves asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix software bugs. Anthropic says it reviewed the report behind the directive and concluded that the capabilities shown are 'widely available from other models,' including OpenAI's GPT-5.5. Security researchers already use these capabilities daily to protect systems. Anthropic's own cybersecurity marketing comes back to bite it. Before launch, the US government, the UK AI Safety Institute, private third-party organizations, and internal teams tested the model for thousands of hours combined. The safety measures are 'substantially more effective than those of any previously deployed model,' Anthropic says. Users even complained they were too restrictive.
Anthropic warns of a dangerous precedent for the entire industry. The company is complying with the order but making its objections clear. '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.' If this standard were applied across the industry, it would effectively halt all new model deployments from every frontier model provider, the company says. In earlier public statements, Anthropic argued that the government should have the power to block unsafe deployments, but through a legal process that is 'transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts.' The current action doesn't meet those principles, the company says, hinting that this could become another chapter in the ongoing clash between Anthropic and the US government. The US government recently issued a new executive order that lets AI developers submit their models for government safety review before release. Anthropic welcomed that approach, but the process apparently wasn't in place yet when the directive came down.
Source: thedecoder
