Artificial intelligence developer Anthropic was reportedly given only 90 minutes by the Trump administration on Friday to remove its newly released and more advanced Mythos and Fable AI models before facing federal licensing restrictions, as per an Axios report on Saturday.
A source familiar with the topic told the website that government officials contacted Anthropic at 1 p.m. ET (5 p.m. GMT) and ordered the company to roll back the models, citing a "national security threat" without providing details.
The source said Anthropic had already completed pre-release testing with the government and had received approval to deploy Fable.
"We immediately sought to understand the specific nature of the threat so we could remediate it," said the source.
By 5.30 p.m. (10:30 p.m. GMT), the U.S. Commerce Department sent Anthropic a letter imposing controls on where the models could be used and by whom, prompting the company to begin withdrawing the systems, Axios reported.
Anthropic confirmed in a public statement late on Friday that it had indeed suspended access to two powerful AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, to comply with a U.S. national security order.
Just three days after publicly launching Fable 5, the company said in a blog post that it received a government directive banning all foreign nationals, even ones who work at Anthropic, from accessing Fable 5 and Mythos 5 over national security concerns.
"The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance," it said.
The company said it received the letter at 5:21 p.m. (9:21 a.m. GMT) on Friday.
Axios reported that the letter came from U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The U.S. Commerce officials did not immediately respond to a request from Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The firm said that the letter did not state what specifically concerned the government. However, the firm's "understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or 'jailbreaking'" the Fable 5 model such that it could aid hacking.
Fable 5, released Tuesday, is a locked-down version of Mythos 5, a cutting-edge AI model that Anthropic has held back from the public amid concerns that it had unprecedented abilities to identify software vulnerabilites, or holes in code that hackers could exploit.
Mythos 5, the unrestricted model, has only been released to select companies.
Anthropic said it had reviewed the "jailbreaking" method at the center of the speculation and the hacking opportunities it exposed, but it does not believe Fable 5 gives hackers capabilities that are not already available through other public models.
The firm said that none of its security testers had found a "universal jailbreak," or a way to bypass its safeguards against helping hackers.
"We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people," the company said.
"If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers."
Anthropic has been locked in a legal standoff with the Trump administration for refusing to allow its technology to potentially be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, leading the Pentagon to cut contracts with the company.
