Commerce blocks Anthropic's Mythos, Fable from foreign use
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- Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick notified Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that the Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models would require export licenses for any transfer outside the U.S. or to any foreign persons within the country.
- The Commerce Department acted after another company claimed it could jailbreak Mythos, alarming the administration about national security risks — an official said the model must stay locked down until U.S. national security infrastructure is hardened, potentially within weeks.
- The administration had asked Anthropic to pause releasing the latest models and was rebuffed, which prompted the export control letter.
- Anthropic announced late Friday it was cutting off all customer access to Mythos and Fable to ensure compliance, calling the action a 'misunderstanding' and saying it is working to restore access.
- Non-compliance would trigger financial and civil penalties, and Anthropic must submit individually validated license applications for every export, re-export, or domestic transfer.
- A recent Trump executive order on pre-deployment AI testing is voluntary and avoids a licensing regime — a carve-out White House chief AI adviser David Sacks secured to prevent what he calls 'regulatory capture' of the biggest labs.
Why it matters: Anthropic is now simultaneously on a Pentagon blacklist deeming it too dangerous for government use and under a Commerce licensing regime deeming it too dangerous for foreign use — a regulatory vise on a company the administration insists it does not want to harm. The dispute shows how jailbreak fears about frontier models are overriding the Trump team's stated preference for light-touch AI policy, turning a voluntary testing framework into a de facto mandatory restriction.
