The Trump administration has escalated its dispute with Anthropic, barring foreign governments, companies and individuals from accessing the company’s most advanced artificial intelligence models.
According to Axios, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei placing Mythos 5 and Fable 5 under export restrictions. The order applies to all destinations outside the United States and to foreign nationals inside the country.
The directive came three days after Anthropic launched Fable 5, the first publicly available version of its Mythos-class models. It also followed reports that an earlier Mythos model had been jailbroken by unauthorized users this year.
Details:
• The restrictions block access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 outside the United States.
• They also apply to foreign nationals inside the U.S., according to the reported directive.
• Mythos 5 had previously been limited to vetted organizations through Anthropic’s Project Glasswing initiative.
• The administration views advanced AI models as a potential national security risk, especially in cyber operations.
• Relations between the White House and Anthropic have been tense since February, when Trump ordered federal agencies to halt use of the company’s technology.
• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth later designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk to national security, before a federal judge temporarily halted some of those measures in March.
• In May, the White House opposed Anthropic’s plan to expand Mythos access to around 120 organizations.
• The Financial Times reported in June that the National Security Agency had used Mythos for offensive cyber operations, with Anthropic engineers embedded inside classified facilities.
• Anthropic said the export action was based on a misunderstanding and warned that applying such a standard could effectively freeze new model launches across the frontier AI industry.
• The company complied by disabling both models for all customers, while keeping its other models, including Claude Opus 4.8, available.
What to watch?
The decision could widen the fight between Washington and leading AI companies over export controls, national security and who gets access to the most capable systems. If the restrictions remain in place for weeks, they could disrupt Anthropic’s plan to shift Fable 5 from free access to paid usage credits on June 22.
