Why the feds just classified Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as munitions
the trump administration forced anthropic to cut off foreign access to its fable 5 and mythos 5 models, citing 'national security' authorities in an unprecedented move that experts say stretches export control rules beyond their traditional limits.
anthropic disabled foreign access to fable 5 and mythos 5 for everyone, including its own employees, after the trump administration issued an unexplained directive citing 'national security' authorities to treat model access as a controlled export. experts and legal analysts are baffled because export controls historically apply to physical goods or discrete software transfers, not remote access to hosted models where users receive only text responses and not weights or code. while the government reportedly hinted at concerns about chinese-linked groups using a 'jailbreak', anthropic countered that the vulnerability did not bypass all safeguards. this unprecedented application of law signals a volatile new phase of ai governance where regulators are aggressively adapting cold war-era frameworks to contain frontier models, potentially leading to more unpredictable disruptions for api access.