The Trump administration has ordered Anthropic to restrict foreign access to its most advanced AI models, prompting the company to take the models fully offline and scramble to respond to sweeping new national security–driven controls.

Anthropic: Anthropic is an AI research company dedicated to building advanced, safe, and aligned artificial intelligence systems, with its Claude models serving as flagship offerings. The company is directly impacted by the Trump administration’s decision to freeze its top AI models, prompting immediate internal responses to mitigate operational disruptions.
Trump administration: The Trump administration comprises the executive branch of the US government under President Donald Trump, responsible for setting and enforcing national policies across technology and security domains. It has initiated a freeze on Anthropic’s leading AI models, creating compliance and access challenges for the company.

• The Trump administration issued a directive requiring Anthropic to block foreign nationals, both inside and outside the US, from accessing its newest advanced AI models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, citing national security concerns.
• Anthropic responded by disabling both models globally for all users, saying this was necessary to comply with the order and criticizing the lack of detail on the government’s specific security rationale.
• Officials framed the move as an export-control style restriction on cutting-edge AI capabilities, amid fears that safety safeguards in these models could be bypassed and misused abroad.
• The action follows a recent executive order requiring AI companies to provide US authorities with access to advanced models before public release, signaling a more aggressive federal posture toward high‑end AI systems.
• Anthropic has argued that the standard implied by the directive would effectively halt the rollout of new AI models industry‑wide and has simultaneously been in legal conflict with the Pentagon over being labeled a supply‑chain risk, even as it continues some government work.
• The intervention has sparked wider industry debate over how far US authorities can and should go in imposing national security–based controls on commercial AI models, and what this means for US AI competitiveness and foreign access to frontier systems.