US orders Anthropic to suspend advanced AI model access for foreign nationals

Anthropic has suspended access to its advanced Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models for foreign nationals after a US export-control directive. The company disputes the government’s concerns over a potential jailbreak but said it is complying with the order.

New Delhi: AI company Anthropic has said the US government issued an export control directive, ordering the company to suspend all access to its advanced “Fable 5 and Mythos 5” models for any foreign national including its employees, inside or outside the United States.

The company is abruptly disabling those models for all customers to comply with the order, Anthropic said in a blog post.

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Anthropic disagreed with the government’s conclusion that the “finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model” deployed to millions of users.

The company feels that such a standard applied across the industry, would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.

The US government did not provide specific details of the national security concern, Anthropic said, adding that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking,” Fable 5.

“We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities,” the statement said.

“These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass,” it added.

In the weeks leading up to the launch of Fable, Anthropic worked with the US government, the UK AISI, multiple private third-party organisations and internal teams to red-team Fable’s safeguards for thousands of hours in total.

These tests showed that Fable’s safeguards are substantially more effective than those of any previously deployed model, the company claimed.

“No testers have yet been able to find a universal jailbreak—a jailbreak method that can very broadly bypass the model’s safeguards, unblocking a wide range of cyber capabilities,” the company statement said.