Anthropic PBC is seeking to resolve a fresh confrontation with the Trump administration over artificial intelligence security that prompted the company to disable global access to its two most advanced AI models.

Senior technical staff from Anthropic met with administration officials at the Commerce Department on Monday to discuss the national security concerns raised by the government, according to a person familiar with the planning. It wasn’t immediately clear which administration officials participated in the talks.

An Anthropic spokesperson said following the meeting that both sides were working quickly to reach a solution. Spokespeople from Commerce didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. 

The discussions are unfolding days after the Trump administration told Anthropic to halt foreign nationals’ access to the company’s cutting-edge Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. Since then, representatives from Anthropic have held numerous virtual meetings with US officials about specific security issues, the company spokesperson said.

The order, sent from the Commerce Department to Anthropic late Friday afternoon, represents the most significant intervention by the US government to date into an AI venture’s operations. It poses a new challenge to Anthropic weeks after the company filed confidentially for an initial public offering, with its latest valuation topping $900 billion.

In a website post late Friday, Anthropic said it had complied with the US directive by disabling access to the two models. The company said it believes the US 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 Anthropic had 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 post. “If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”

Privately held Anthropic, which has long positioned itself as a more responsible AI developer, first shared its Mythos model in April with a very limited group of companies and institutions, warning that its ability to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities made it too risky to distribute more widely.

Last week, the company released Fable 5 as the first public-facing version of its Mythos-class model, but with guardrails aimed at containing the full range of its cyber capabilities.

Ayham Boucher, executive director of AI Strategy and Innovation at Cornell University, says the debate is being framed as a simple request for Anthropic to “fix the guardrails” and then remove the Fable 5 ban, but that underestimates the difficulty in resolving a highly technical problem.

“Describing this as a request to ‘fix the guardrails’ makes the problem sound much simpler than it is,” Boucher said. “That framing assumes model jailbreaks are a solved technical problem and that Anthropic merely implemented the guardrails incorrectly. Jailbreak resistance is not like patching a normal software bug.”

Anthropic’s revelations about Mythos helped to accelerate the Trump administration’s efforts on AI policy, culminating in an executive order from President Donald Trump earlier this month that called for voluntary reviews of cutting-edge AI models. That order explicitly said that nothing in it should be construed as creating a mandatory licensing regime.

The Commerce Department’s directive on Friday for Anthropic to halt access for foreign nationals added a new level of uncertainty for companies and allied governments seeking to comply with administration policy. “Clearly, the news from the last few days is a huge wake-up call for others across the industry,” said Joelle Pineau, Chief AI Officer, at Cohere Inc., a Canada-based AI developer.

“The fact that models which a few days before were presented as some of the most capable in the industry suddenly are no longer accessible means that there can be a lot of volatility in terms of access to the technology,” Pineau said in a Bloomberg Television interview on Monday. “That’s got to be a big concern for companies.”

The dispute marks the latest clash between the administration and the company. Anthropic has been embroiled for months in a feud with the Pentagon over extra guardrails the company sought for military use of its AI tools. After contract talks broke down, the Defense Department declared the firm a supply-chain risk in March and is moving to seek other AI providers for the armed forces.

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Published on June 16, 2026