The US just did something that should be a wake-up call for every business and policymaker in this country.
We’ve just witnessed that a frontier AI model can be switched off worldwide, overnight, by a single government directive.
Anthropic didn't choose to switch off our access. This came from Washington.
Britain is in the process of building its productivity story, its public services and its future labour market on AI it doesn’t own, cannot govern and cannot switch back on. The compute is elsewhere, the models are elsewhere, and the off switch is elsewhere.
We learned this with gas supply in recent conflicts. We are about to learn it again, in the one technology that actually matters to us for the next decade.
What this shows us is that we don't have an AI strategy. We have a hosting arrangement. And the host just showed us the terms.
This may blow over and get switched back on. But questions regarding national self-sufficiency and resilience, in a world where alliances are more fragile, should be screaming in the minds of our politicians this morning.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement:
anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…