Close aide to Anthropic and US government reportedly raised security concerns around Mythos and Fable.

Countries across the world are reeling from the effects of an abrupt suspension of two of Anthropic’s most capable AI models following an order from the US government late on Friday (12 June).

Now, senior technical staff from the AI giant are reportedly in Washington to meet with White House officials in hopes to resolve their second major dispute in months.

In a surprise statement on Friday, Anthropic said that the US government issued an export control directive, ordering the company to suspend access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 by “any foreign national, whether inside or outside the US, including foreign national Anthropic employees”.

The order has effectively halted the usage of the company’s industry-leading cybersecurity models Mythos and its more restrained version, Fable, released just last week.

The letter, sent to Anthropic at 5:21 pm EST (10:21 pm Dublin Time), cited national security concerns but did not provide specific details, the company said.

“Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5.

“These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.

“We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models,” the statement read.

David Sacks, a former AI ‘czar’ and the co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said that a “highly credible trusted partner” of Anthropic and the US government “who was testing Fable” told officials about a potential jailbreak to Fable’s guardrails.

“In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimising language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company,” Sacks wrote in a post on X.

And Pentagon’s chief information officer Kirsten Davies said that the move prioritises national security. “Some things are simply more important than revenue cycles, clickbait and pre-IPO valuation,” Davies said.

Meanwhile multiple media publications reported on Saturday (13 June) that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was among the tech leaders who raised concerns with the US government over potential security concerns in Anthropic’s models, leading to an export control ban. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

A company spokesperson for Amazon told TechCrunch that its “not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks”.

The European Commission is among the foreign regions facing the ramifications of the sudden suspension of Anthropic’s latest models. Several of the bloc’s countries, as well as the UK, had been in discussions with the company over Mythos and its potential applications in securing their systems.

In a statement on Sunday (14 June), the Commission said that it is analysing the implications of an export control directive.

“We are seeing a new generation of highly ​capable AI models reach the market. ​These models offer significant benefits, including for cyber-defence, but ‌they ⁠also raise serious cybersecurity concerns that need to be addressed,” a European Commission spokesperson said.

“We ​believe that ​contingency measures ⁠taken in this light should not be discriminatory against partners.

“This development is a ​further ⁠illustration of why Europe needs to strengthen its technological sovereignty…We are looking ⁠closely ​at the practical consequences ​of this for European users of these services.”

In a similar statement, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said that the incident highlights the risk of overreliance on a small number of powerful AI tools.

This is the second major dispute Anthropic has had with the US government, which could have drastic consequences for the AI giant as it gears to go public in an estimated $1trn-plus listing.

The company is currently engaged in a legal battle with the Trump administration following a separate incident earlier this year after Anthropic refused to change its AI safeguards for usage by the US government.

Anthropic said that its late-February ‘supply chain risk’ designation by the US government was not legally sound. Its more recent statement last week makes similar connections, claiming that the Trump administration’s actions do not adhere to principles of transparency, fairness and facts.

The tug of war between the Anthropic and the US government comes as the latter eyes technological domination in AI over its contemporaries.

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