Anthropic received an export control directive from the Trump administration late Friday ordering the company to suspend access to its two newest Claude models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, by any foreign national anywhere in the world, including foreign national employees working inside Anthropic itself.
The directive arrived just days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for more binding government oversight of the AI industry. According to CNBC, the administration cited national security authorities but did not specify its concern.
Amodei had written in that essay that "Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety." The directive that followed was not the kind of oversight the company said it had in mind.
Anthropic pushed back. The company said it disagreed that the administration's finding was cause for a recall and called the situation a misunderstanding. In a blog post, the company stated its position directly: "As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles."
The action was the second time this year Anthropic found itself in the Trump administration's crosshairs. The company, now valued at close to $1 trillion, has spent years publicly supporting AI safety regulation and has backed legislation at both state and federal levels. It called a Trump AI executive order signed earlier this month an important step.
That executive order, signed about 10 days before the directive against Anthropic, asked companies on a voluntary basis to provide models to the federal government for capability assessments before a full release. It also gave administration officials 60 days to develop review frameworks. The order was thin on specifics.
Senior Anthropic employees flew to Washington to meet with Trump administration officials on Monday. The company told CNBC that both parties are working quickly to resolve the situation. Anthropic has not said when it expects its models to come back online for foreign nationals.
Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 after splitting from OpenAI, and the company has consistently argued that safety-focused regulation benefits the industry. The Friday directive put the company in the position of opposing a government action it had, in principle, long said it supported.
