Anthropic suspends access to Fable 5, Mythos 5, citing US directive

Anthropic has abruptly disabled its flagship AI models after a US government directive citing national security concerns.

Anthropic has suspended access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models after receiving a US government export control directive citing national security concerns.

In a statement posted Friday, Anthropic said the government order requires it 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.

The AI firm said it received the directive at 5:21 pm ET, and the "net effect" of the order is to abruptly disable the models for all users to ensure compliance.

It said the government did not provide specific details about the alleged threat, but said it believes authorities are concerned about a possible "jailbreak" method capable of bypassing the models' safeguards.

However, Anthropic defended its model's guardrails, maintaining that over thousands of hours of penetration testing, a "universal jailbreak" -- a method to broadly bypass the model's safeguards -- had been found.

"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," said Anthropic.