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Cybersecurity vets protest ‘dangerous’ US government ban on Anthropic’s most powerful models
8:29 AM PDT · June 15, 2026
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A group made up of dozens of cybersecurity experts, including several well-known veterans of the industry, published an open letter to the U.S. government asking it to lift the export control order on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models.
According to the open letter, “this action has taken the best models away from [cybersecurity] defenders” who now can’t use the models to find vulnerabilities and make their software and products more secure.
“To pull the best capabilities away from defenders without a good reason when our adversaries are rapidly advancing is dangerous,” read the letter.
On Friday, the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to limit the export of Fable and Mythos, citing national security concerns, without explaining the specific reasons behind the order, according to Anthropic. In response, the company suspended access to the models to all users worldwide.
As of this writing, the letter is signed by 76 cybersecurity experts, including Alex Stamos, former Facebook chief of security; Casey Ellis, the founder bug bounty platform Bugcrowd; Jon Callas, famed cryptographer and former Apple security design and architecture manager; Paul Vixie, computer scientist ; Dino Dai Zovi, the former head of applied security engineering at Block; Katie Moussouris, the founder of Luta Security; and Rachel Tobac, the CEO of the security awareness training firm SocialProof Security.
When Mythos launched as a preview in April, Anthropic claimed it was so powerful at finding security vulnerabilities that the company needed to tightly restrict access to prevent malicious hackers or foreign adversaries from using it to cause havoc on the internet. In practice, that meant Anthropic gave around 50 companies initial access to Mythos, recently expanding that group to include around 150 organizations in 15 countries.
Last week, Anthropic released Fable, a public version of Mythos that the company said had strict guardrails to block its use in the fields of biology, chemistry, and cybersecurity, as well as to stop others from distilling the model in order to re-create it. The guardrails on Fable were so strict that many cybersecurity experts found that it stopped essentially any prompts related to cybersecurity.
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Anthropic said that the White House export control order may have been based on a report that there was a method to bypass — or jailbreak — Fable to unlock its powerful Mythos-level capabilities.
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According to Katie Moussouris, one of the signatories of the open letter, the method was demonstrated by Amazon researchers in a paper that is not public but that she has reviewed.
But Moussouris said in a blog post that the paper did not actually demonstrate a real jailbreak. Instead, she wrote, the researchers simply asked Fable to fix open source code with public and known vulnerabilities along with “deliberately planted vulnerabilities,” after the model initially refused to “review the code for security issues.”
“The behavior described in the paper cannot meaningfully be fixed, and any attempt would only weaken the model for defense,” Moussouris wrote. “Defenders need to be able to ask AI to fix the bugs in a file, explain why the fix matters, and write tests that confirm the patch works. That is not a guardrail bypass. It is the most valuable thing an AI model can do for defensive security: executing the find, fix, and test loop defenders run every day.”
Moussouris’ critique was echoed in the open letter, which also said that the group of experts believe the model capabilities in the Amazon paper “can be replicated” on OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, on Anthropic’s own publicly available Claude Opus 4.8 and Sonnet, “and even Chinese models like Kimi 2.7.”
Moussouris told TechCrunch that “the bugs used to demonstrate the techniques in the paper can be found using the other models. The method in the paper is a guardrail bypass technique. Other models that lack the Fable guardrails often won’t refuse the straightforward request to look for security bugs, so they don’t need a bypass.”
The letter also asked for transparently and fairly enforced regulations created by “a democratic rule-making process” that are based on scientific research done by industry and academic experts, and “used only to the minimal extent necessary to ensure the safety of the American public.”
Topics
AI, Anthropic, Claude, Claude Fable 5, Claude Mythos, Mythos, Security
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Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
Senior Reporter, Cybersecurity
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Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai is a Senior Writer at TechCrunch, where he covers hacking, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy.
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As Anthropic suspends access to new models, India debates its AI future
8:00 PM PDT · June 13, 2026
Anthropic’s sudden move to suspend access to its newest AI models following a U.S. government directive has raised fresh questions across the global technology industry. In India, the decision has reignited a long-running debate over whether one of the world’s largest AI markets can afford to rely on technologies built and controlled elsewhere.
The announcement came late Friday, when Anthropic said it had received the U.S. government directive requiring it to suspend access to its recently launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for all foreign nationals, including its own foreign national employees. The move came shortly after the company announced a partnership with Indian IT services giant Tata Consultancy Services to expand enterprise AI adoption in India, underlining how closely the country’s AI ambitions have become tied to technologies developed and governed in the U.S.
While the broader implications remain unclear, some reports said the initial security concerns were first reported to the government by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. And The Information said the White House is unlikely to extend similar restrictions to other AI companies and is privately blaming Anthropic’s handling of alleged jailbreak vulnerabilities. Anthropic has disputed the government’s characterization and argued the action should not have been taken.
Regardless, the development has triggered debate among Indian founders, investors, and policy experts over whether the country should accelerate efforts to build domestic AI capabilities, deepen investment in open-source alternatives, or continue relying on a handful of U.S. frontier model providers. For some, the episode is a wake-up call on technological dependence. For others, it is a reminder that access to increasingly critical AI systems can be shaped by geopolitical decisions beyond India’s control.
India has become one of the most important markets for frontier AI companies. Anthropic and OpenAI have both described the South Asian nation as their second-largest market after the U.S., reflecting its growing importance in the global AI race. The companies have already set up their offices in India, expanded local hiring, partnerships, and enterprise initiatives in recent months, betting on India’s vast base of developers, startups, and businesses to accelerate adoption of their latest technologies.
For many in India’s technology sector, Anthropic’s Friday announcement was about more than just one AI company. It reopened questions about the country’s long-term AI strategy and whether India could afford to remain dependent on a small number of foreign frontier AI providers.
“It completely changes things,” said Aakrit Vaish, founder of Indian AI venture platform Activate, referring to Anthropic’s decision. “I think this materially changes the way all of us should be thinking about sovereign AI in India.”
Vaish told TechCrunch that he woke up on Saturday morning “shocked and confused” by the announcement and said it strengthened the case for developing domestic AI capabilities. He expects startups to increasingly turn to open-source models and plans to encourage companies in his portfolio to reduce their dependence on a small number of frontier AI providers.
For some founders, the bigger concern was what restrictions on frontier AI access could mean for competitiveness. Vijay Rayapati, co-founder and CEO of Atomicwork, told TechCrunch that the episode highlighted the risks facing startups whose teams span multiple countries if access to advanced AI systems increasingly becomes subject to geopolitical restrictions.
Atomicwork has around 25 employees in the U.S., though much of its product engineering team is based in Bengaluru, India.
“If your AI team is not made up entirely of U.S. citizens, you are at a competitive disadvantage,” Rayapati said, arguing that unequal access to frontier AI models could give some companies a significant edge over rivals.
The concern comes as parts of India’s tech sector are already grappling with questions about how AI could reshape the economics of global talent. This week, U.S. real estate technology company Opendoor shut its India office less than two years after expanding in the country, with CEO Kaz Nejatian citing a push to bring operational work closer to customers in the U.S. and a shift toward smaller AI-native teams.
While Opendoor did not specify how much of the decision was driven by AI-related efficiencies, the move added to a broader debate about how advances in AI could affect the future of global technology work and what that might mean for India’s position as an engineering talent hub.
Beyond Anthropic
In addition to startups and AI builders, the Anthropic episode also prompted a broader debate among India’s technology leaders about dependence on foreign AI infrastructure.
Sridhar Vembu, founder of Indian SaaS company Zoho, said the move showed that “technology is the ultimate weapon” and urged Indian organizations to increasingly embrace smaller and open-source models.
“What can our government do right now? Ensure that orgs in India embrace smaller models, both Indian and Chinese open source ones,” Vembu wrote on X.
Investor and former Infosys executive Mohandas Pai responded to Vembu on X, arguing that the development highlighted the need for a far more ambitious national AI strategy and calling on the government to substantially increase investments in AI, computing infrastructure, and deep technology.
“We are way behind and need a national mission to get going quickly,” Pai wrote, urging the government to create an annual ₹500 billion (about $5 billion) fund for AI and deep tech, alongside a ₹2 trillion (around $21 billion) credit guarantee program to support cloud infrastructure, hardware, and semiconductor development.
Pai’s proposal would dwarf India’s existing AI efforts. In 2024, New Delhi approved the IndiaAI Mission with an outlay of ₹103.72 billion (about $1.2 billion) over five years, aimed at expanding compute infrastructure, supporting startups, and developing indigenous AI capabilities.
Despite growing interest in AI and New Delhi’s push to develop domestic capabilities, India remains a relatively small player in frontier model development. Only a handful of startups are pursuing foundational AI models, including Sarvam, which released open-source models earlier this year. However, another high-profile AI startup, Krutrim, pivoted toward cloud and AI infrastructure services after initially positioning itself around foundational model development.
Much of India’s AI ecosystem has instead concentrated on applications and specialized models built on top of existing foundation models. Recent examples include Avataar AI, which launched a video-generation model earlier this week aimed at providing a lower-cost alternative to offerings from rivals including Google’s Veo, Kling, Luma, and Runway.
Not everyone agrees that the primary challenge is a lack of capital. Responding to Pai’s comments, Lightspeed partner Hemant Mohapatra argued that the biggest constraints to building globally competitive AI companies are talent, access to computing resources, and execution, rather than simply the size of investment commitments.
Mohapatra estimated that training a frontier AI model could cost anywhere from hundreds of millions to several billion dollars, depending on the approach, but said successful AI companies have historically scaled their capital requirements over time as adoption grew.
Yet for some policy observers, the implications extend well beyond AI startups or model providers.
Prasanto Roy, a New Delhi-based technology policy expert who advises multinational companies, said the episode would likely reinforce concerns within the Indian government about strategic autonomy, comparing it to the lesson many countries drew from Russia’s loss of access to SWIFT and other parts of the global financial system following its invasion of Ukraine.
He told TechCrunch that the move was likely to provoke a significant nationalist backlash in India and described it as a poorly considered decision by Washington, with consequences extending far beyond Anthropic itself.
“Even if this is corrected or reversed, the Anthropic episode shows there’s no such thing as a geopolitically neutral foreign LLM,” Roy said. “American AI models are bound to American geopolitics.”
Topics
AI, Anthropic, India, india ai, Startups
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Jagmeet Singh
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Jagmeet covers startups, tech policy-related updates, and all other major tech-centric developments from India for TechCrunch. He previously worked as a principal correspondent at NDTV.
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