Anthropic has suspended its state of the art AI models after the US government directed the company to limit access for all foreign nationals, citing national security concerns.
Anthropic received the directive from commerce secretary Howard Lutnick on Friday afternoon, after the government discovered a “jailbreak”, or a way of bypassing safety guardrails built into the model. Anthropic added that the “net effect” of the order, confirmed by a US official, was that it was forced to switch off access everywhere, including in the US.
The Trump administration has had access to Anthropic’s frontier Mythos model for several weeks, and several officials had raised concerns about its potential use to exploit cyber security vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure, such as the global financial system. Federal agencies were experimenting with the model ahead of its release.