U.S. order forces Anthropic to pull cybersecurity models worldwide

The Trump administration forced Anthropic to cut off global access to its newest cybersecurity models, placing Fable 5 and Mythos 5 at the center of a widening fight over how Washington can pressure AI companies. Anthropic said the U.S. government issued an export-control directive on June 12, citing national security authorities, and ordered the company to suspend access for any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States.

Anthropic said it complied by disabling access for all customers worldwide. The company said it believed there had been a misunderstanding and was trying to restore access, but the order had already turned a product launch into a test of federal leverage over frontier AI systems. The models had been unveiled only days before the directive landed.

The dispute quickly broadened beyond Anthropic. A letter signed by 76 cybersecurity experts, including Alex Stamos, Casey Ellis, Jon Callas, Paul Vixie, Dino Dai Zovi, Katie Moussouris, and Rachel Tobac, urged the White House to lift the restrictions. The signers argued that the move undercut defenders who rely on advanced models to find vulnerabilities and secure software, rather than stopping adversaries who could seek out other tools.

Reuters reported that cybersecurity leaders at major companies including Nvidia and Adobe also asked the Trump administration to reverse the restrictions. CNBC said senior Anthropic staffers were meeting with Trump administration officials in Washington, D.C., on Monday to try to resolve the latest high-profile dispute over the company’s models. The gathering underscored how quickly the issue had shifted from a technical access problem into a political and regulatory confrontation.

The episode also carried a larger warning for the industry. It showed that AI firms can face pressure not only through traditional export rules on chips and hardware, but through controls on model access itself. TIME reported the standoff came amid a separate conflict between Anthropic and the Trump administration over military use of its systems, after Anthropic refused to allow the U.S. military to use its AI models for fully autonomous weapons systems and the Pentagon placed the company on a blacklist. Together, the disputes signaled a new phase in which frontier AI companies must navigate national-security demands, procurement risk, and executive branch retaliation at the same time.