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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”

A coalition of states has opened a wide-ranging investigation into the artificial intelligence start-up OpenAI, the company said Saturday, adding to a growing backlash over A.I.
State attorneys general subpoenaed OpenAI on Friday asking for internal documents on its practices, including its handling of user data, safety of minors and advertising activities, according to the company. New York, Colorado and other states are involved in the investigation, according to two people familiar with the probe, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing legal matter.
“We take the concerns raised by state attorneys general seriously and intend to engage constructively with their offices,” OpenAI said in a statement. The company added that the newest version of its model, ChatGPT, includes more safeguards like parental controls to protect children.
“None of this changes what families have gone through, but we are committed to learning, improving, and getting this right,” the company said.
OpenAI declined to provide further details on the investigation, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
A.I. has drawn increasing scrutiny as the number of cases of children harming themselves after using the technology has grown along with A.I.-generated scams. Concerns about the technology’s ability to replace humans, as well as soaring energy costs from the data centers that power it, have added to the angst.
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Gas prices may be easing now, but oil executives are warning the White House that the real crunch could be just weeks away. With commercial stockpiles and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve sliding toward levels not seen in decades, industry models shared with officials show crude supplies could hit “critical lows” by late summer, driving pump prices beyond $5 a gallon. The warnings come as the Iran war chokes traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for global oil, and as inflation—already running at a three-year high—erodes President Trump’s standing with voters ahead of the midterms, the Washington Post reports.
Trump has publicly dismissed the concerns, saying he “loves” inflation and predicting oil will fall “like a rock” once the war ends. Some aides also note prices have dipped in recent weeks, crediting reserve releases and regulatory waivers. But senior industry figures, including American Petroleum Institute chief Mike Sommers, are going public with their concern, saying the administration is underestimating how quickly inventories are draining and how limited tanker traffic remains. “I hope they are paying attention to inventories right now,” one industry executive said, per Politico. “You’re hitting tank bottom.” If prices spike, an industry official said, neither side wants to be blamed for failing to act in time.
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The week that ends tomorrow easily ranks at the very top when it comes to the sheer amount of public statements made by Xbox and Microsoft executives in the span of a few days.
Through a series of interviews, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball outlined a bold plan to rescue the division from its low margins (and the potential spin-off, joint venture, or sale by the parent company). Yesterday, in a video interview with Hard Fork, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claimed no one could accuse the company of not having invested in Xbox throughout the past 25 years, but now the time has come to make it sustainable and monetize the content. Nadella even went so far as to quip that YouTube currently monetizes Xbox games better than Microsoft itself.
Asha is really 100 days in, and she put out a post saying, in the next 100 days, she’s going to take a fresh look and make sure we deliver on what our fans expect of us both on the hardware side and on the publishing side. The challenge now for us is to think about how do you innovate both in hardware as well as in the games going forward in a world in an economically viable way.
We’ve invested a lot. No one can accuse Microsoft of not having invested for the last 25 years. And now we have to turn this into a sustainable business that delivers what is fundamentally one of the best sources of entertainment. The challenge we have is that we’ve not been monetizing that entertainment. If anything, we’ve been subsidizing that entertainment. In fact, there’s more monetization of Xbox games happening on YouTube than at Microsoft.
From Nadella’s statement, it’s clear the gloves are off, and Xbox must live (or die) on its own, as Microsoft will no longer bankroll it indefinitely. Later in the interview, Nadella added that Asha Sharma and her fellow execs must define a new model that somehow merges all the various Xbox platforms, from the console to PCs, from mobile to cloud.
Unfortunately, because of what’s happening with the cloud and AI, the prices have gone up. It’s happening with PCs, it’s happening with phones, and Xbox is impacted as well. The scarcity of semiconductor supply and memory in particular is having a massive impact on consumer electronics. That’s a temporal thing that I think we’ll get through. It is not going to be permanent. There is a permanent thing, which is: what’s the Xbox model going forward? PCs and consoles both have their place, obviously, mobile has people playing elsewhere, and so we have to now bring it all together while staying true to what we’ve always done.
It’s no easy feat, though the road appears to be already paved with Project Helix, which will allow users to play PC games on an Xbox console. The software situation is perhaps more problematic: Sharma confirmed that Xbox cannot afford more than one or two exclusives (for now, and Clockwork Revolution) until the business becomes healthier. And then there’s the output issue: the new Xbox CEO openly wants to invest more in big franchises like Halo, Fallout, and Elder Scrolls while reducing funding for smaller games.
It will take some time before the new leadership’s actions can actually affect the bottom line. Until then, Xbox must hold fast.

BEIJING (AP) — China said Saturday it firmly opposed the U.S. adding several prominent Chinese businesses to its list of military companies, and that the move ignored the consensus reached during U.S. President Donald Trump’s summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping last month.
The Pentagon on Monday added several non-state-owned Chinese companies, including electric vehicle maker BYD, tech giants Alibaba and Baidu to its list that seeks to identify Chinese companies it deems to have ties to the Chinese military, preventing them from landing U.S. defense contracts.
By adding these firms to the list, “the U.S. side has ignored the consensus reached during the meeting between the heads of state of the two countries in Beijing,” a Chinese Ministry of Commerce spokesperson said Saturday in a statement.
The U.S. has “disregarded the overall interests of bilateral economic and trade relations, continuously generalized the concept of national security, and abused state power to unjustifiably suppress Chinese enterprises,” the spokesperson added.
BYD, Alibaba and Baidu said earlier there’s no basis to include them in the list.