A global shock: Washington cuts access to Mythos 5 and Fable 5 for reasons of national security

The ax fell on Friday June 12 in the evening. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick issued an order to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

It places the latest generation models Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 under the very restrictive export control regime.

According to information from Axios, Washington made this decision after learning that an unauthorized entity had succeeded in circumventing the safeguards of these models, known to be capable of detecting and exploiting computer vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed.

Access prohibited “to any foreign national”

The American embargo formulates a ban on access for “any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States.”including Anthropic’s own international engineers and collaborators.

Unable to sort its users on a global scale, the San Francisco start-up has decided to suddenly deactivate access for all of its customers around the world.

The company, historically positioned in the niche of ethical and secure AI, firmly contests the proportionality of this government measure: “We dispute that the discovery of a potential circumvention justifies the recall of a business model deployed to hundreds of millions of people.”a indiqué Anthropic via communiqué.

This decision is a new episode in the crisis between the start-up and the Trump administration. Last March, the Pentagon had already terminated its contracts with the laboratory, described as “Supply chain risk”after Anthropic refused to see its technologies exploited for mass surveillance or the automation of lethal weapons.

Blackout for users

This cut represents a rare violent shutdown of the user’s memory of a decentralized computer system.

Presented on June 10 by the publisher, Claude Fable 5 announced itself as the new benchmark in terms of code and cybersecurity. Based on the same architecture as the ultra-secure Mythos 5 version – until now reserved for a restricted consortium of 200 companies within the Project Glasswing —, Fable 5 integrated specific filters against cyber and biological risks.

Despite premium pricing set at $10 per million tokens on entry and $50 on output (i.e. double Claude Opus 4.8), the first feedback from industrial customers was rave.

Specialized platforms and integrators welcomed an exceptional capacity for autonomy and code validation for the design of complex interfaces.

One of the operational consequences of this sudden offline is theinterruption des flux de production. Applications natively relying on the Fable 5 API automatically failover to older models like Opus 4.8, resulting in performance losses.

The French presidential election seizes the shock in the name of digital sovereignty

The impact of this embargo has gone beyond the borders of Silicon Valley and the small world of technology for businesses.

She is entering the French political arena, in the middle of the electoral campaign launch period.

The demonstration of the extraterritoriality of American law on a major technological tool provoked a reaction from the entire French political class, which sees it as confirmation of a critical dependence on American technologies.

Former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal summed up the situation abruptly, citing a risk of technological vassalization: “The AI ​​war has already begun (…) We cannot count on others because this makes us vulnerable, the decision of the United States shows this. Anthropic is their Strait of Hormuz » report l’AFP.

Same observation with Édouard Philippe. He warns of the fact that Europe today does not master « neither the models nor the calculation » for an infrastructure that has become as vital as electricity.

From left to right, calls for the reorientation of public procurement towards sovereign solutions are increasing. The candidates are urging massive support for the national champion Mistral AI and the European ecosystem, some going so far as to publicly invite the leader of Anthropic to relocate his teams and laboratories to Paris.