Anthropic is meeting with White House officials this week in an attempt to overturn a ban on its most advanced AI models, which was reportedly put in place after Amazon’s CEO spoke with members of the Trump administration.
The US government told the artificial intelligence company to suspend all use by foreign nationals of its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models last week, citing “national security” concerns.
The ban includes foreign national Anthropic employees, according to the firm, meaning the Claude creator was forced to “abruptly disable” the models for all customers in order to ensure compliance.
“The government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5,” Anthropic said in a statement.
“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 decision by the Trump administration to enforce the ban came after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy spoke with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other US officials, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Amazon researchers had flagged the jailbreak issue noted by Anthropic in its statement, prompting Mr Jassy to reportedly warn that it could be used to carry out catastrophic cyber attacks.
The Independent has reached out to Amazon for comment.
Tech entrepreneur David Sacks, who serves as an advisor to the Trump administration, said on Saturday that the jailbreak warning had come from a “highly credible trusted partner” of both Anthropic and the US government.
“The Admin asked Dario [Amodei, Anthropic CEO] to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused,” Mr Sacks wrote in a post to X.
“In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety.”
A separate report from Semafor claimed that the White House’s decision to ban foreign use of Mythos was also driven by fears about Chinese access to the AI tool.
Anthropic prohibits access to its AI models from within China, with a spokesperson for the firm claiming that the US government had not raised any concerns about Mythos being used by any specific adversaries.
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