Commerce Forces Anthropic Models Offline

The U.

S. Commerce Department required Anthropic to obtain authorization before sharing its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models with foreign nationals, citing national-security concerns related to a reported jailbreak. Anthropic could not reliably verify users’ nationality in real time and therefore disabled the models worldwide, affecting customers and employees beyond the targeted group. The restrictions were later withdrawn after Anthropic reported stronger safeguards and agreed to expanded government testing and information sharing, but Commerce retained the ability to reinstate them. The episode demonstrates that export-control powers can directly affect frontier-model availability without new AI-specific legislation, leaving companies and customers exposed to abrupt and potentially nontransparent interventions.