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Anthropic shuts down Mythos access after sweeping U.S. order
Dario Amodei, chief executive officer and co-founder of Anthropic, speaks onstage during the 2025 New York Times DealBook Summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Dec. 3, 2025, in New York City.
(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
ByMaggie Eastland
and Hadriana Lowenkron
June 13, 2026 6:09 PM PT
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Anthropic PBC has disabled access to its most advanced artificial intelligence models, including Mythos, following an unprecedented order by the Trump administration to keep the technology out of the hands of all foreign nationals.
The U.S. government told Anthropic to suspend access to the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models by any foreign national “whether inside or outside the United States,” citing national security concerns, the company said in a statement.
A U.S. official confirmed that the Commerce Department sent the letter. The model developer has since shut off access to both systems to all customers to ensure compliance.
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Never before has the U.S. government taken such sweeping measures to rein in foreign access to frontier AI models developed by an American company. The Trump and Biden administrations have limited access abroad to other consequential technologies such as semiconductors and supercomputers, and some have debated the merits of blocking access to AI models. But restrictions on the software itself have raised constitutional and commercial concerns.
Anthropic said it believes the U.S. government issued the order after discovering that it’s possible to “jailbreak,” or bypass the guardrails, of Fable 5, a recently released version of Mythos that the company blocked from carrying out cybersecurity tasks.
“We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people,” Anthropic said in its website post. “If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”
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Researchers at Amazon.com Inc. had conducted jailbreak research that revealed some vulnerabilities in Anthropic’s model, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Amazon and the U.S. government were in contact about the vulnerability before the controls were imposed, according to people familiar with matter who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy was involved in those exchanges, one of the people said. The Information reported earlier that Jassy raised concerns to senior U.S. officials.
An Amazon spokesperson said it’s not uncommon for governments to consult with the company on security risks, but declined to share details of any such discussions.
The government’s move to so widely restrict access to a set of AI models in the name of national security threatens to set a precedent for all major AI model developers including OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc. Industry leaders such as Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have in the past encouraged the US government to instead promote worldwide adoption of American AI systems and protect the nation’s lead.
“For anyone who was naive and perhaps hoping that this leverage wouldn’t be exerted, it’s a massive wake-up call,” Aidan Gomez, the co-founder of Cohere Inc., a Nvidia Corp.-backed AI startup, said Saturday in an interview. “No one can deny it any more.”
Judge blocks ban on Anthropic’s AI, calling it illegal ‘retaliation’
Anthropic PBC won a court order blocking a Trump administration ban on government use of the company’s artificial intelligence technology, after the Claude chatbot maker argued the move could cost it billions in lost revenue.
March 27, 2026
Anthropic said it received the government order at 5:21 p.m. New York time on Friday. The end-of-day directive runs counter to earlier statements, as well as an executive order recently signed by President Trump, which suggested the administration wouldn’t pursue a licensing regime for model reviews.
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Friday’s directive also threatens to escalate long-standing tensions between Anthropic and some within the Trump administration. Earlier this year, the AI developer clashed with the Pentagon over the use of its technology for military and surveillance purposes. The administration declared the company a U.S. supply-chain risk as a result of the blowup and ordered U.S. agencies to phase out the use of its products.
Privately held Anthropic, which has long positioned itself as a more responsible AI developer, first released its Mythos model in April to a very limited group of companies and institutions, warning that its ability to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities made it too risky to distribute more widely.
There were signs that the limited release was working to ease tensions between Anthropic and the Trump administration: In April, the U.S. government was preparing to make a version of Mythos available to major federal agencies, Bloomberg previously reported.
Mythos also accelerated the Trump administration’s efforts on AI policy, which included the recent executive order that called for voluntary model review. That order explicitly said that nothing in it should be construed as creating a mandatory licensing regime.
David Sacks, Trump’s former AI czar and current co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, said that Anthropic refused to fix a jailbreak of the guardails in its Fable model.
“The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release,” he wrote in a post on X. “The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.”
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The latest government restriction is colliding with a race among U.S. developers to deliver the most advanced AI models and prove to their investors that the technology can turn a profit. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are seeking initial public offerings as soon as this year, following SpaceX’s own historic IPO.
The rush to deliver the most cutting-edge AI models spurred Anthropic itself to post a lengthy blog earlier this month, calling for the creation of a system in which governments and AI developers collectively decide when to slow work on the technology to stave off the risks it may pose.
“It would be good for the world to have the option to show or temporarily pause” AI work that may be dangerous, the company said in the post at the time. AI is advancing to the point where the technology can make human work thousands of times more efficient or even replace it, creating a new set of risks, the company said.
The European Union’s executive arm said that it’s assessing Anthropic’s statement and is continuing to talk to allies about the potential risks and cybersecurity concerns related to powerful new AI models. The European Commission added that the latest developments underline Europe’s need for technological sovereignty.
‘“s a person in the field, I’m not particularly thrilled to see this,” said Cohere’s Gomez. “I don’t think this is partnerly, I don’t think this is the right thing to do for the broader technological alliances that have developed over the course of the past 80 years.”
Eastland and Lowenkron write for Bloomberg. With assistance from Shirin Ghaffary, Yi Wei Wong, Gian Volpicelli, Spencer Soper and Thomas Seal.
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