White House imposed export controls on Anthropic's Mythos AI model over suspicions of Chinese access, prompting the company to withdraw both Mythos and its consumer version Fable 5 from the market.

What happened

The Trump administration on Friday directed Anthropic to limit access to Mythos and Fable 5 to US citizens only, which would have blocked even foreign-national employees. Rather than comply with those restrictions, Anthropic chose to remove both models from the market completely.

Why it matters

Mythos was designed to find bugs in computer code—a capability the company flagged as dangerous if it reached the wrong hands. If a China-linked group had accessed the model, it could pose national security risks and allow China to attempt reverse-engineering the model through a process known as distillation. The White House also raised concerns that Fable 5 could be jailbroken (stripped of its safety guardrails), and according to an adviser to President Trump, Anthropic's CEO initially refused to fix the jailbreak.

What to watch

Anthropic released Fable 5 to the public earlier this week as a version of Mythos with guardrails meant to prevent its use for cybersecurity purposes. The company prohibits access to its products from within China. The exact organization that allegedly accessed Mythos, and how it gained that access, remain unclear.