Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic disabled its most advanced AI models for all of its customers on June 12 to comply with an export control directive from the Trump administration, the company said in a statement.
Anthropic said it received the directive late Friday, which ordered the company to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States.
The company said the order effectively forces Anthropic to “abruptly disable” both models for all of its customers. Access to the company’s other models is not affected.
Anthropic said the letter “did not provide specific details of its national security concern.” However, it is the company’s understanding that the government believes there is a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking,” Fable 5.
“To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws,” the company said. “Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government.”
The action follows a dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon over the company’s restrictions on military uses of its AI models. Anthropic has said it would not allow its systems to be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.
President Donald Trump later ordered federal agencies to cut ties with the company, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” a label typically associated with foreign national security threats. Anthropic has filed two lawsuits alleging illegal retaliation.
The directive also signals a departure from the Trump administration’s previous hands-off approach to export restrictions on AI models. In May 2025, Trump announced he would rescind the Biden-era “AI diffusion rule” that would curb the export of advanced AI chips.
Anthropic said it was complying with the government’s legal directive but believes “this is a misunderstanding.”
“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. “If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”
“As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts,” it added. “This action does not adhere to those principles.”
Technology experts and nonprofit groups also criticized the decision, including Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI).
“AI regulation will be some of the most serious and consequential work the U.S. government does over the next generation, and it is imperative that this work be done consistently across industry, without favor, and according to a clear, rules-based process,” said ARI President Brad Carson.
“Based on what we know thus far, the decision to block Anthropic’s latest AI model fails that test, and as a result, risks America’s edge in AI innovation,” Carson said. “While the federal government must have the capacity to evaluate and even block the deployment of advanced AI models in extraordinary situations, the utmost care is required to insulate these decisions from impulse and political favoritism.”