Anthropic’s safety warnings may have just backfired — the government has pulled the plug on its most powerful AI
Key takeaways
- The U.S. government on Friday ordered Anthropic to immediately shut off access to two of its most powerful AI models — Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 — citing national security concerns.
- Access to Anthropic s other models isn t affected.
- It was immediately the most capable AI model available to the public, according to benchmark tests from Vals AI, a company that tracks AI tech performance.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
The U.S. government on Friday ordered Anthropic to immediately shut off access to two of its most powerful AI models — Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 — citing national security concerns. Anthropic announced on X that it has complied, but it made clear it thinks the government got this one wrong.
The directive, which Anthropic said it received on Friday at 5:21 pm ET, forces the company to disable both models for all users worldwide — not just the foreign nationals the government s export control order was nominally aimed at. Access to Anthropic s other models isn t affected.
Why does any of this matter? Mythos is Anthropic s most capable AI model, one the company previewed in early April and has kept tightly restricted ever since because of what Anthropic described as its exceptional ability to find security vulnerabilities in software. According to Anthropic, Mythos identified flaws in every major operating system and web browser it tested, so rather than release it broadly, the company launched a controlled program called Project Glasswing, sharing it with roughly 50 vetted organizations, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike, to use for defensive cybersecurity work.