EU cyber agency to meet Anthropic amid Fable 5 export ban fallout

The U.S. Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on June 12 after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly warned officials the models could facilitate cyberattacks.thenextweb
Anthropic called the response disproportionate, saying the jailbreak involved “previously known, minor vulnerabilities” already present in competitors’ models, and met with White House officials Monday to resolve the dispute.thenextweb
The European Commission confirmed ENISA will meet Anthropic Thursday in San Francisco, a session originally planned to discuss EU access to Mythos through its Project Glasswing initiative.techcrunch

Anthropic Fable 5 Shutdown Sparks Cybersecurity Debate

The U.S. Commerce Department’s unprecedented use of export controls to force Anthropic to disable its most advanced AI models has triggered alarm among cybersecurity professionals and drawn international attention, with the European Union’s cybersecurity agency ENISA set to meet with the company on Thursday in San Francisco to discuss the fallout.

The Shutdown

On the evening of June 12, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei ordering the company to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including Anthropic’s own non-citizen employees. Because Anthropic has no mechanism to selectively filter users by nationality in real time, the company disabled both models for all customers worldwide within hours.contracollective

The action marked the first time the U.S. government has used export controls to restrict access to a commercially available AI model already in wide public use. Anthropic’s other Claude models, including Opus 4.8, remained unaffected.fortune

Amazon’s Role and the Jailbreak Concern

The catalyst appears to trace back to Amazon. According to The Wall Street Journal, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other officials that Amazon researchers had used Fable 5 to obtain information that could facilitate cyberattacks. The government imposed the export ban shortly afterward.thenextweb

Anthropic has pushed back, stating the directive was “based on a narrow, non-universal jailbreak involving capabilities that are already available in other models”. The company said the jailbreak surfaced only “a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities” and called the government’s response disproportionate.facebook

Reports also indicated the White House acted partly on suspicions that a group linked to China had accessed Mythos, raising fears the model could be reverse-engineered by a foreign adversary.forbes

Cybersecurity Backlash and EU Response

Dozens of cybersecurity experts published an open letter urging the White House to lift the restrictions, warning the move sets a precedent that could discourage American AI companies from building advanced security tools. TechCrunch called the enforcement action “a wake-up call for any U.S. tech company”.techcrunch

Meanwhile, the European Commission confirmed Wednesday that ENISA will meet with Anthropic on Thursday in San Francisco. The meeting was arranged before the export control order, when Anthropic had been preparing to give ENISA access to Mythos through its Project Glasswing initiative. Bloomberg had reported on June 1 that ENISA was poised to become the first EU agency granted access to the model.devdiscourse

Anthropic met separately with White House and Commerce Department officials on Monday in Washington to attempt to resolve the dispute.bbc