Anthropic to meet with Trump administration over Mythos dispute

Senior Anthropic staffers are meeting with Trump administration officials in Washington, D.C., on Monday to try to resolve the artificial intelligence company’s latest high-profile dispute with the U.S. government, according to a source close to the company.

The person spoke anonymously to discuss an internal matter.

Anthropic received an export control directive on Friday that cited “national security authorities” and ordered the company to suspend access to its latest AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, “by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States,” according to a statement.

The AI startup disabled access to the models for all of its customers in order to ensure compliance with the directive.

The unexpected action marks the latest wrinkle in Anthropic’s relationship with the government, which has been strained after a clash with the Department of Defense escalated earlier this year. The DOD labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk in March, which banned defense contractors from using the company’s technology because it purportedly threatens U.S. national security. 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addressed the government’s latest directive in a post on X on Saturday, writing that “every passing day” proves why blacklisting Anthropic was “the right move.”

Anthropic sued the Trump administration in an effort to reverse the supply chain risk designation, and that litigation is ongoing.

Anthropic unveiled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on Tuesday, just days before it received the export control directive from the government. The company worked with government agencies to test the models ahead of the release and received approval to deploy them, according to a person familiar with the discussions who asked not to be named in order to discuss confidential matters.

The government called Anthropic at 1:00 p.m. ET on Friday and instructed the company to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 because of an unspecified national security threat, the person said. Anthropic received a formal letter around 5:30 p.m. ET that required the company to suspend the models.

Before the directive landed on Friday, Anthropic received no communication about a national security threat, the person said.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was among several tech leaders who raised concerns to senior Trump administration officials about security risks in Anthropic’s latest AI models, a White House official confirmed to CNBC.

“As a leading cloud provider that serves a large number of private and public sector customers, it’s not uncommon for governments to seek out counsel on potential security risks,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “When they occur, we don’t share the details of those discussions.”

Amazon and Anthropic are deeply linked. Amazon has invested $8 billion in the startup in recent years, and in April it committed to spend up to $25 billion in the future, with the funding tied to certain commercial milestones. Anthropic is a major user of Amazon’s Trainium AI chips, as well as its cloud technologies. Amazon is also reliant on Anthropic’s models for many of its services.

Fable 5 and Mythos 5 build on Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, a powerful model that excels at identifying security vulnerabilities within software. Anthropic limited the rollout to a select group of companies as part of a cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing, and its approach appeared to earn it some goodwill from the Trump administration, which held several meetings with the company about the model’s capabilities.

Anthropic touted Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as state-of-the-art models that top many industry benchmarks. Mythos 5 is still limited to a select group of users, but Anthropic made Fable 5 available to its enterprise customers and paid subscribers. The company said the broad release was possible because of new safeguards that block responses in specific high-risk areas, including cybersecurity and biology.

In its statement on Friday, Anthropic said it believes the government’s concern is around a “potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak,” where a user could bypass a cybersecurity guardrail and ask Fable 5 to “read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws.”

“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,” Anthropic 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 characterized the dispute as a “misunderstanding” and said that it is working to restore access to the models “as soon as possible.”

WATCH: Anthropic disables new Mythos-class models days after release in response to government directive