NEW YORK: The US government´s order for Anthropic to withdraw its most powerful artificial intelligence models has sparked a wave of criticism from both advocates and opponents of AI regulation.
On Friday evening, the San Francisco-based company announced that the US Department of Commerce had ordered it to suspend Mythos 5 and Fable 5 for “national security” reasons, without providing further details.
Unlike Mythos 5, which was unrestricted and available only to a small number of partners, Fable 5 was heavily protected to prevent any major misuse, particularly for cyberattacks or the development of chemical and biological weapons.
But Anthropic said an organisation -- whose identity it didn´t disclose -- reported to the Trump administration that it had found a way to bypass safeguards designed to prevent Fable 5 from being used for a cyberattack.
Anthropic described the loophole discovered by this third party -- identified by several media outlets as Amazon -- as “narrow” and said the software vulnerabilities it exposed were “minor.”
The directive applied only to access by foreign nationals, but Anthropic said it was unable to distinguish among users based on nationality and was therefore forced to take its models offline.
A government´s outright ban on an advanced AI model developed by a domestic company is unprecedented.
China blocks access to the most capable Western AI models and imposes restrictions on major domestic AI companies, but those restrictions are generally built into the models before they are released.
Entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky said the implications of the order are “enormous.”
Any startup “making frontier models is at the mercy of the government,” he commented on X. “Therefore, the order doesn´t just punish Anthropic. It changes the rules for the entire industry.”
Researcher Gary Marcus said he saw the United States and China battling to a “tie” in the AI race -- until Friday´s government announcement.
“It didn´t occur to me the Trump administration could trip the US efforts from behind,” Marcus said. “But it just did.”
Some observers argue that Anthropic bears considerable responsibility for its predicament after it had warned for years about the risks associated with the most advanced AI models.
