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Anthropic disables Claude Fable 5 globally after US national security order
Because it cannot verify a user's nationality in real time, the company switched off both models for every customer rather than risk breaching the order
Anthropic disables Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 globally after US order restricting foreign access over national security concerns.
Anthropic has disabled its two most powerful artificial intelligence models worldwide after the US government ordered the company on Friday to cut off access for any foreign national, citing national security, the company said.
The directive, received at 5:21pm eastern time,
required Anthropic to suspend all access to the models, Claude Fable 5 and
Mythos 5, by any foreign national whether inside or outside the United States,
including the company's own foreign-national employees, according to Anthropic
and reported by CNBC and NBC News.
Because it cannot verify a user's nationality in
real time, the company switched off both models for every customer rather than
risk breaching the order.
All other Claude models remain available, and the
company's landing page carried the line "Fable 5 is temporarily
unavailable." The two systems had launched only days earlier, with Fable 5
billed as the most capable model Anthropic had released to the public.
A disputed jailbreak
The order was sent by Commerce Secretary Howard
Lutnick and drafted with the department's Bureau of Industry and Security, an
administration official told NBC News.
The government cited national-security authorities
but, Anthropic Ai said, supplied only "verbal evidence of a potential narrow,
non-universal jailbreak" rather than written specifics.
The concern, according to the company, centred on a
technique that involved "asking the model to read a specific codebase and
fix any software flaws."
Anthropic disputed that this warranted the action,
saying it disagreed "that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak
should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions
of people," and that the same weakness was "likely also present"
in rival systems, naming OpenAI's GPT-5.5.
Anthropic said governments should be able to block
unsafe deployments "as part of a statutory process that is transparent,
fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts," adding that this order did
not meet that standard.
The Commerce Department did not immediately respond
to a request for comment, NBC News reported. It is the first time a leading AI
company has pulled a publicly deployed model offline because of US federal
intervention, the broadcaster said.
Months of friction with Washington
The shutdown is the latest turn in a dispute between
Anthropic and the Trump administration that has run for months.
The friction stems from the company's acceptable-use
policy, which bars Claude from powering fully autonomous weapons or domestic
mass surveillance, restrictions the Department of Defense wanted lifted for all
lawful military use.
Chief executive Dario Amodei refused to drop the
guardrails, saying frontier AI was "simply not reliable enough to power
fully autonomous weapons," according to reporting by NPR and Axios.
In late February the administration ordered federal
agencies to stop using Anthropic products, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
labelled the company a "supply chain risk," a designation usually
reserved for firms tied to foreign adversaries.
Anthropic sued the administration on 9 March to
reverse the move. A federal judge in San Francisco, US District Judge Rita Lin,
granted a preliminary injunction in late March blocking both the designation
and the order barring federal agencies from using Claude, writing that nothing
in the law supported "the Orwellian notion that an American company may be
branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the US for expressing
disagreement with the government," according to reporting by CNN and NPR.
Anthropic later lost a separate bid in April to have
an appeals court pause the dispute, and the appeals court heard arguments on 19
May. The case is continuing.
Why it matters for Bangladesh
The episode marks the first time Washington has
applied export-control logic, long used to restrict advanced computer chips, to
an AI model itself, raising questions over which frontier tools will reach
users in countries such as Bangladesh.
For Bangladeshi developers, freelancers and students
who had begun using Claude's most advanced tier, the worldwide shutoff removed
access overnight. Online freelancing and information-technology work are among
the country's fastest-growing sources of foreign-currency earnings after
remittances and ready-made garment exports, and access to leading AI tools has
become an increasingly important input for that workforce.
It also underscores how the availability of such
tools in markets like Bangladesh can depend on policy decisions taken in
Washington rather than on local demand.