Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, attends the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, India on Thursday, February 19, 2026.
Ruhani Kaur | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Anthropic announced on Friday that it had disabled access to its artificial intelligence models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to comply with an export control directive from the U.S. government citing “national security authorities.”
The company announced at 5:21 p.m. ET that it had received an order directing it to suspend all access to its models by “foreign nationals, including Anthropic’s foreign employees, whether in the United States or abroad.”
Anthropic suddenly disabled the model for all customers to ensure compliance, but said all other models were unaffected.
This unexpected move comes just days after Anthropic unveiled the Fable 5 and Mythos 5, two powerful models that the company touted as cutting-edge across various industry benchmarks. Fable 5 in particular marks the first time Anthropic has released such an advanced product to the public, thanks to new safeguards that block responses in certain high-risk areas.
These models build on the Claude Mythos Preview, which was released in April and captivated Wall Street and government officials with its advanced cybersecurity features. The company said it has no plans to make this model generally available and is limiting its rollout to a select group of companies as part of a cybersecurity initiative called “Project Glasswing.”
Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the government did not provide specific details about national security concerns. The company apologized to customers for the confusion.
“As we have said publicly, we believe governments should have the ability to deter unsafe deployments as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear and based on technical facts,” Antropik said. “This action does not comply with those principles.”
The announcement marks Anthropic’s latest clash with the U.S. government, after a high-profile clash with the Pentagon leaked into public view earlier this year.
After negotiations between the two organizations broke down, the Department of Defense declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, meaning it allegedly posed a threat to U.S. national security. This label has historically been reserved for foreign adversaries, requiring defense contractors to certify that they will not use Anthropic’s Claude models in their work with the military.
Anthropic sued the Trump administration to remove its blacklisting, and the lawsuit is still ongoing.
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