US National Security Order Forces AI Firm Anthropic to Suspend Powerful Models

AI research firm Anthropic announced Friday it has suspended access to two of its powerful artificial intelligence models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, in response to a U.S. national security directive. The move comes just three days after Fable 5 was publicly launched.

Anthropic received a government directive banning all foreign nationals, including its own employees, from accessing Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns. The company stated that the order effectively requires them to "abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance."

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The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

While the directive did not specify the exact nature of the government's concerns, Anthropic understands that the government believes a method has been discovered to bypass or "jailbreak" the Fable 5 model. This could potentially allow the model to aid in hacking activities. Fable 5 is a restricted version of Mythos 5, a more advanced AI model that Anthropic had previously withheld from public release due to concerns about its ability to identify software vulnerabilities.

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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 claims it has reviewed the alleged "jailbreaking" method and the associated hacking risks. However, the company stated that it does not believe Fable 5 grants hackers capabilities beyond those already available through other public AI models. Anthropic also noted that its own security testers had not found a "universal jailbreak" that bypasses safeguards against assisting hackers.

The company expressed disagreement with the decision, arguing that a "narrow potential jailbreak" should not warrant recalling a commercial model used by millions. Anthropic warned that applying such a standard across the industry could halt the deployment of new AI models by all leading developers. This action follows a history of legal disputes between Anthropic and the Trump administration regarding the use of its technology for surveillance and autonomous weapons.

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If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.