Anthropic confirmed tonight that it has suspended access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 for all customers following a US government export control directive. Here are the details.
A little context
Anthropic earlier this week has been activated Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5.
Both models derive from Claude Mythos Preview, a highly advanced model designed for security research, capable of finding security bugs and flaws.
Access to Mythos Preview was initially limited to a small group of companies and research partners through Project Glasswing. In the weeks that followed, participants reported identifying and solving numerous security problems with the help of the model. Mozilla alone says it has patched hundreds of vulnerabilities as a direct result of using Mythos Preview.
When Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 this week, the company said the Mythos family will be limited to Project Glasswing participants, while Fable will be released to the public.
The tale contained several guardrails and restrictions designed to prevent abuse, some of which have been lifted severe criticism. Since its inception, Anthropic has been tweaking its security measures to try to strike the right balance between security and usability.
Anthropic draws Fable 5 and Mythos 5
But earlier tonight Axios Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that “Anthropic has sent a letter to CEO Dario Amodei informing him that the Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models will be subject to export controls anywhere outside the United States and to all foreign persons within the country.”
From Axios:
An administration official told Axios that the Commerce Department decided to take action after another company claimed to be able to jailbreak Mythos, alarming the administration about possible national security risks.
Axios adding that the Trump administration had previously tried to block Anthropic from releasing the model, but failed. The report also noted that under the export control directive, a license would be required “for the export, re-export or domestic transfer of Anthropic models”.
In light of this, Anthropic announced emphasized that it has decided to disable Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 for all customers, but access to all other models remains unaffected.
From Anthropic:
Citing national security authorities, the US government issued an export control directive to stop all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national inside or outside the US, including foreign Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we have to abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compatibility. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.
We received the directive from the government today at 5:21 PM ET. The letter did not provide specific details of the national security concern. We understand that the government believes it is aware of a method of bypassing or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this particular technique used to identify small previously known vulnerabilities. All of these vulnerabilities seem relatively straightforward, and we’ve found that other publicly available models can detect them without requiring a port.
The company listed the extensive safeguards it had in place when it released the Fable 5, adding that while it intends to share more information in the next 24 hours, it believes the government’s directive is based on a narrow, non-universal jailbreak that includes capabilities already available on other models, “including OpenAI’s GPT-55.”
Ultimately, Anthropic apologized to customers for the outage, said it believed the government’s action was based on a misunderstanding, and promised to work to restore access as soon as possible.
You can read Anthropic’s full statement here.
Update: Claude’s official account on X he explained Here’s what users should expect as a result of tonight’s directive:
New sessions across Claude products will run in your default model or Opus 4.8, and existing Fable 5 sessions will terminate with an error.
Queries to Fable 5 on the Claude Platform will also return an error. Please update your integrations to other Claude models.
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