The Trump administration moved Friday to block foreign access to Anthropic’s most advanced artificial intelligence models, ordering the company to pull its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 systems from any foreign national, whether inside the United States or abroad, effective immediately.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick delivered the order in a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Friday afternoon, according to Axios, which first reported the development. Anthropic said it received the directive at 5:21 p.m. ET and announced compliance within hours.
What Triggered the Action
The Commerce Department acted after a separate company claimed to have successfully “jailbroken” the Mythos model, alarming administration officials about potential national security risks, according to an administration official who spoke with Axios. That official said the administration had previously pressed Anthropic to pause the release of the new models, but the company declined, leading to the formal export control letter.
The models need to stay restricted until the U.S. government’s national security apparatus is adequately hardened, the official said, and that process could take several weeks.
Lutnick’s letter was drafted with the help of officials from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, according to NBC News. Under the order, a license is required for any export, re-export, or domestic transfer of the models. Anthropic must also apply separately for individually validated licenses. Failure to comply carries potential financial and civil penalties.
Anthropic Complies, but Disputes the Reasoning
The directive extended to any foreign national, including Anthropic’s own employees who are not U.S. citizens. Because the company says it has no way to filter users by nationality in real time, it chose to shut both models down for all customers everywhere. All other Anthropic products, including Claude Opus 4.8, Sonnet, and Haiku, remain online.
Anthropic issued a public statement saying it would follow the legal directive but rejected the government’s reasoning. The company characterized the jailbreak concern as a “potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” that works by prompting the model to read a specific codebase and flag software flaws.
After reviewing the reported technique, Anthropic concluded that the same capability is already available through other publicly accessible models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, and is used daily by security researchers and system defenders. The company said it has not received evidence that any jailbreak led to actual harm.
“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 wrote in its blog post.
The company said it believes the situation may stem from a misunderstanding and that it is working toward restoring access.
The Models at the Center of the Dispute
Anthropic launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on June 9, three days before the government’s directive arrived. Fable 5 was the first time the company had made a Mythos-class model available to the general public. The two share the same underlying architecture but differ in their restrictions: Fable 5 carries classifiers that block outputs in high-risk categories such as cybersecurity and biology, while Mythos 5 operates with some of those guardrails removed and was limited to a vetted set of organizations through Anthropic’s Project Glasswing.
Before launch, Anthropic said both models were put through thousands of hours of red-teaming by U.S. and U.K. government entities. The company also has a pre-deployment testing partnership with the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, originally signed in 2024 and renegotiated under the current administration.
A Compounding Dispute With Washington
Friday’s action adds another layer to an already strained relationship between Anthropic and the federal government. The company is simultaneously listed on a Pentagon blacklist that designates it a supply chain risk, barring it from government use, and now faces a Commerce Department licensing regime that restricts foreign access to its most capable systems.
Read More: Pentagon Blacklists US AI Firm Anthropic and Court Refuses to Stop It
Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order directing pre-deployment testing of frontier AI models. That order is voluntary and does not create a licensing requirement. David Sacks, who served as Trump’s White House AI and crypto adviser before stepping down from that role in March 2026 to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, had pushed for that voluntary structure, arguing that mandatory licensing would amount to regulatory capture of the largest AI labs.
One administration official told Axios that the president “does not want to hurt the industry and wants innovation to continue.”
The Commerce Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
https://redstate.com/joesquire/2026/06/13/trump-administration-slaps-export-controls-on-anthropics-two-newest-ai-models-n2203312
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