Bloomberg reported that US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last Friday ordering the company to obtain an individually-validated license from the Commerce Department before exporting, re-exporting, or transferring its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models to any foreign national anywhere in the world. Lutnick cited US laws permitting export controls on civilian technology that could be used for intelligence purposes by an adversary's military, and threatened criminal and civil penalties for non-compliance, though he offered no explicit basis for the restriction.

The directive prompted Anthropic to disable all access to both models late Friday. Since then, Anthropic representatives have held virtual meetings with US officials, and technical staff met with Commerce Department officials in person on Monday. The Trump administration is believed to have acted after determining that Fable 5 — a recently released variant of Mythos — could be jailbroken to bypass cybersecurity guardrails. Anthropic called the government's response disproportionate, warning that applying the same standard industry-wide "would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers."

Bloomberg described the order as the most significant US government intervention into an AI company's operations to date, striking Anthropic weeks after it filed confidentially for an IPO at a valuation exceeding $900 billion. Lutnick is traveling with President Trump for the G7 summit in France.