Two weeks after the Trump administration issued a Friday evening ultimatum, Anthropic has kept its Mythos-class models offline and provided no public updates on negotiations. The company sent a barrage of executives to Washington, DC, but declined to comment multiple times this week, saying there was no news to share. The lack of resolution is raising concerns that President Trump could expand his order to more companies with similar technology.
The June 12th export control order demanded that Anthropic suspend access by any foreign national to Mythos 5 and Fable 5 due to security concerns, a ban that covered any non-US citizen inside or outside the US, including those employed by Anthropic. Anthropic has concluded that its only option is to keep these models offline, with no clear framework for applying export controls to AI systems complicating the talks.
According to a source familiar with negotiations, the US Department of Commerce apparently tested Fable 5 before release and raised no complaints, and Anthropic concluded its models were safe. The agency reportedly didn't act until Amazon CEO Andy Jassy flagged a method for seemingly breaking Fable 5's guardrails, at which point the process was crunched into a few days. The broader impasse could have dire implications not just for Anthropic but for the entire US AI industry.