White House Halts Anthropic AI Over China & Cyber Threats

The Trump administration reportedly cut off foreign access to Anthropic's powerful new AI model, Fable 5. This action followed a warning from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, concerns about unauthorized Chinese access, and cybersecurity fears. Here's the thing: Amazon researchers used specific prompts to get the Mythos-class model to provide restricted information about cyberattacks. Jassy then raised these concerns with senior administration officials. What's interesting is that the U.S. government suspected a Chinese-linked group may have already used the jailbreak Amazon discovered. However, an Anthropic spokesperson stated the White House did not raise Chinese access in its discussions with the company. The Commerce Department used national security export controls to bar Anthropic from distributing Fable 5 and its underlying model, Mythos 5, to foreign nationals. This led Anthropic to disable both models for all users. This marks the first time the U.S. government has used export controls to halt access to a commercial AI model already widely used. This unprecedented step has sparked concern and intensified calls for sovereign AI.