Overview
- The Commerce Department issued an export‑control directive on June 12 that bars foreign nationals from accessing Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and Anthropic disabled both models worldwide to comply.
- U.S. officials say researchers found a way to bypass Fable 5’s safety guardrails so users could access Mythos‑class cybersecurity capabilities, a finding the NSA reviewed and judged plausible after Amazon flagged the issue to the government.
- Reports say U.S. concern included possible access by a China‑linked group to Mythos, and officials worried that remote access or model copying through techniques like distillation could let adversaries replicate the model’s capabilities.
- A coalition of cybersecurity leaders and tech CEOs has urged Commerce to lift the controls, saying defenders rely on top models to find and fix vulnerabilities and that the government action is unprecedented for cloud services.
- Talks between Anthropic and federal agencies have continued without a deal, leaving the export directive in force and prompting broader debate over whether the 2018 Export Control Reform Act can lawfully and practically be used to police live, remotely hosted AI models.