Anthropic export controls turned an abstract policy fear into a live one last week: as of June 13, 2026, one US government directive took the company\u2019s two most powerful AI models offline for users everywhere, including, briefly, Anthropic\u2019s own foreign-born employees, and set off alarm bells across Europe and Canada about who really controls the AI the world runs on.<\/p>\n
The mechanics were startling in their speed. The reaction abroad has been louder still.<\/p>\n
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.The net effect of\u2026\u2014 Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) June 13, 2026<\/p>\n
Launch to lockdown in four days<\/p>\n
On June 9, 2026, Anthropic made\u00a0Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5\u00a0generally available, the public face of a model class the company had developed under controlled access since April through a programme called Project Glasswing. Fable 5 was described as a Mythos-class model made safe for general use, state-of-the-art on nearly all tested benchmarks, with strong performance in software engineering, scientific research, and autonomous work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mythos 5, the more capable sibling, stayed restricted to Glasswing partners and selected biology researchers. Four days later, it was gone.\u00a0Anthropic said it\u00a0received\u00a0an export control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 at 5:21 pm ET on June 12,\u00a0with\u00a0the letter not\u00a0explaining\u00a0the specific security concern in detail.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Unable to filter users by nationality in real time, the company said it had to \u201cabruptly disable\u201d access for all customers to comply. The order, issued by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in a letter to CEO Dario Amodei, called for suspending all access by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The jailbreak at the centre of it<\/p>\n
Washington cited national security, specifically, a method for \u201cjailbreaking\u201d Fable 5, or getting around its safety guardrails. Anthropic disputed the severity, saying the technique amounted to a limited capability to review programme code and identify errors, something rival models, including OpenAI\u2019s GPT-5.5, can also do.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The government\u2019s account is sharper. David Sacks, co-chair of the President\u2019s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology,\u00a0said on X\u00a0that the administration asked Amodei to either fix the vulnerability or pull the model from deployment, and that Amodei refused. Sacks pressed the contradiction directly: \u201cIn their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn\u2019t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the US government believe; nor is that kind of minimising language consistent with Anthropic\u2019s brand as the AI safety company.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true: \u2014 As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.\u2026\u2014 David Sacks (@DavidSacks) June 13, 2026<\/p>\n
The Wall Street Journal\u00a0reported the move was also shaped by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other officials that Amazon researchers had used Fable 5 prompts to obtain information that could aid cyberattacks. Amazon is one of Anthropic\u2019s largest investors. A spokesperson said it is \u201cnot uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks,\u201d but declined to share details.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A fight that started months before<\/p>\n
None of this began last week. The dispute erupted earlier this year after Anthropic insisted its technology should not be used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons systems, infuriating Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth. President Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic\u2019s technology, and Hegseth designated the company a \u201cSupply-Chain Risk to National Security\u201c, a label, the company\u2019s lawsuit notes, usually reserved for foreign adversary firms like Huawei.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Anthropic sued to reverse the blacklisting, warning it could jeopardise \u201chundreds of millions of dollars\u201d in revenue. The result is a company simultaneously deemed too dangerous for the US government\u2019s own use and too dangerous for foreign use, a contradiction not lost on observers. Dean Ball, an AI policy expert who briefly served in the Trump administration, called the order \u201csimply cartoonish,\u201d noting that an administration willing to export advanced AI chips to China now wants to ban Britain and every other non-American from using Anthropic\u2019s best models.<\/p>\n
The export controls heard around the world<\/p>\n
Outside the US, the response went straight past the jailbreak debate and landed on a single, uncomfortable realisation: a tool embedded in companies, research institutions, and public services worldwide had been switched off by a foreign government, with an email, in an afternoon.<\/p>\n
The European Commission confirmed it is examining the fallout. Spokesperson Thomas Regnier said the new generation of highly capable AI models offers real benefits, including for cyber-defence, but raises serious cybersecurity concerns that need addressing, adding that \u201ccontingency measures taken in this light should not be discriminatory against partners.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
European politicians were blunter. French commentary framed the decision as an accelerator of the geopolitical battle over AI, with the argument that \u201cEurope cannot settle for being an open market dependent on technologies designed, funded, and controlled elsewhere.\u201d Finnish MEP Aura Salla said Europe \u201ccannot continue to increase its technical potential by relying on access that can be turned off by a foreign government overnight.\u201d The timing sharpened the point: the Commission had published its Technological Sovereignty Package \u2014 including a Cloud and AI Development Act \u2014 on June 3, just nine days before the shutdown.\u00a0euronews + 2<\/p>\n
The unease crossed the Atlantic. Speaking in Ireland ahead of the G7 summit, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the restrictions show the dangers of overreliance on a limited number of American providers, framing it as a lesson in diversification. \u201cThe situation we\u2019re in collectively right now with Mythos and Fable is something that can happen with overreliance on certain models,\u201d Carney said, flagging AI as a major topic for the summit. In Britain, AI and Online Safety Minister Kanishka Narayan said the episode should drive deeper investment in the country\u2019s own AI industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What happens next<\/p>\n
Anthropic\u2019s position has not moved. It maintains that applying this standard across the industry \u201cwould essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.\u201d The route back runs through the Commerce Department\u2019s Bureau of Industry and Security, where a licence is now required for export, re-export or domestic transfer of the two models, with individually validated licences needed for reinstatement and civil penalties for non-compliance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sacks framed the off-ramp plainly: fix the jailbreak, lift the control. \u201cThe ball is in Anthropic\u2019s court,\u201d he wrote. For the governments now watching from outside, the patch is almost beside the point. The lesson many of them have already drawn is that access to frontier AI is no longer purely a matter of price or product; it is a matter of whose jurisdiction holds the switch. Last week, the answer turned out to be Washington\u2019s, and a lot of capitals didn\u2019t like how that felt.<\/p>\n
See also: Anthropic IPO filing marks AI maturing into enterprise utility<\/p>\n
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\nThe post The AI off switch: How Anthropic\u2019s export controls sparked a global AI sovereignty scramble appeared first on AI News.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Anthropic export controls turned an abstract policy fear into a live one last week: as of June 13, 2026, one US government directive took the company\u2019s two most powerful AI models offline for users everywhere, including, briefly, Anthropic\u2019s own foreign-born employees, and set off alarm bells across Europe and Canada about who really controls the [\u2026]<\/p>\n
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