Anthropic representatives are meeting with officials in Washington, DC, today to resolve a deepening dispute with the US government after the Trump administration issued an export control directive Friday ordering the company to suspend access to its two most powerful AI models.
The company received an order Friday evening instructing it to suspend all access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models "by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees."
To ensure compliance, Anthropic disabled the models for all of its customers, though access to all other Anthropic models remains unaffected.
According to an administration official, the Commerce Department acted after another company reported it had successfully jailbroken Mythos, raising concerns about national security risks. The administration had previously attempted to get Anthropic to delay the release of the models but was unsuccessful, prompting the export control letter. The official added that the models could remain locked down until the government's national security apparatus is hardened, a process that could take several weeks.
In a statement, Anthropic said it "disagrees that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people," adding that applying such a standard across the industry "would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers."
The latest confrontation adds another chapter to an already fraught relationship between Anthropic and the Pentagon. The Department of Defense declared Anthropic a "supply chain risk" in early March, requiring the U.S. military to cease using its models and prohibiting defense contractors from using them for government contracts. Anthropic is currently challenging that designation in federal court. Fortune
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives flagged the widening rift as a significant risk for enterprise customers. “There is growing confusion on the red lines with Anthropic and the Pentagon to discuss a deal between the DoW and Anthropic, but these ongoing negotiations around Mythos will set a precedent for future fronter models being developed and deployed across enterprise and government use cases.”
Ives cited growing confusion over the red lines between Anthropic and the Pentagon and warned the supply chain risk designation from March could continue to create ripple effects for Claude deployments on the enterprise side in the months ahead.
Despite the regulatory turbulence, Ives maintained that Claude remains a major player in the AI sector and called for a swift resolution. "These issues need to be resolved sooner rather than later for the tech sector and ongoing enterprise deployments and pilots," he wrote.
