Open claude.ai and it says, “Cloud Fable 5 is currently unavailable.” Click ‘Learn More’ and the website redirects to a statement from its creator Anthropic explaining the US government’s directive to suspend access to AI models.
Anthropic, the US company behind the cloud, on Saturday shut down two of its most advanced artificial intelligence models – Fable 5 and Mythos 5 – to every user around the world, including India, after the Donald Trump administration ordered it to deny access to all foreign nationals on national security grounds.
By Anthropic’s own admission, India has the highest number of cloud users (5.8% of global users) followed by the US (22%).
The company said it received the export control directive at 5.21pm ET on Friday and disabled both models within a few hours. Because it can’t reliably distinguish foreign nationals from other users in real time, it has closed the models to everyone — including Americans. Access to all other Anthropic models is unaffected.
Humanitarian response and US response
A US official confirmed that the directive came from the Commerce Department. Axios reported that the letter came from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The letter did not mention specific concerns, Anthropic said, adding that its “understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5” – a workaround that could allow the model to be used to find software vulnerabilities, or access other illicit information such as creating weapons or explosives.
Fable 5, released just a few days ago, is a locked-down public version of Mythos 5, a model Anthropic has said is capped by its unusually strong ability to find holes in code that hackers can exploit. Mythos 5 has only gone to a small group of companies and governments that Anthropic Project calls Glasswings. The goal is to allow these selected groups and entities to discover other potentially dangerous uses or vulnerabilities in their own infrastructure.
Anthropic rejected the U.S. government’s directive and said it reviewed the technology at the center of the speculation and found that it exposed only a few small, already known vulnerabilities that other publicly available models could also find. It added that no security tester had detected a “universal jailbreak”.
It alleged that the government had presented “only verbal evidence of a possible narrow, non-universal jailbreak”.
“We disagree that the discovery of a narrow potential jailbreak should lead to a recall of a commercial model deployed to millions of people,” the company said.
It warned: “If this standard were implemented industry-wide, we believe it would essentially halt the deployment of all new models for all Frontier model providers.”
Anthropic said it believes there has been a “misunderstanding” and is working to restore access.
Kirsten Davis, the government’s chief information officer, wrote on
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What could suspension mean?
For years, US export controls have targeted chips and devices that power AI. Restricting foreign access to finished models is a sharp escalation – Washington is moving from hardware to software.
Dean Ball, a former senior AI adviser in the Trump White House and lead drafter of the administration’s 2025 AI Action Plan, said on Twitter that the order implies that all non-Americans based in the US will be banned: “It means you should be expected to prove your citizenship in order to use the Anthropic model.”
It appears that the wording of the directive also includes Anthropic’s own foreign-born employees.
Reuters reported co-founder Chris Olah, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and philosopher Amanda Eskel as being born abroad, but said it could not determine their citizenship status, and Anthropic declined to comment on whether such employees would lose access.
The move also comes as Anthropic, valued at $380 billion in February, is moving toward an initial public offering (IPO).
For India, the episode is a stark reminder of a familiar vulnerability: the country’s continued reliance on marginal AI, which it neither creates nor controls. Like the previous dependence on foreign technology, an Indian user, startup or institution that started building on Fable 5 this week may have found that the tool has gone out of business overnight.
Earlier this week, India’s Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) announced a partnership with Anthropic to help clients adopt enterprise AI. TCS had said it would set up a dedicated business unit focused on providing strong customer value proposition, joint industry solutions and deep AI expertise through early access to cloud models.
Of course, there are many other cloud models available for use.
Also read: OpenAI files for IPO: Why AI giants are racing to Wall Street
Anthropic vs Pentagon
The closure is the latest twist in a months-long dispute between the anthropic-US government. Its origins and its stakes were laid out in unusual detail by former adviser Ball on the New York Times podcast The Ezra Klein Show in March.
According to Ball, the company’s relationship with the U.S. government dates back to the summer of 2024, when the Joe Biden-era Pentagon and Anthropic agreed to use the cloud in classified settings — including intelligence analysis — with two carves: no domestic mass surveillance, and no fully autonomous lethal weapons.
The Trump administration extended the contract on the same terms through 2025, Ball said, before the relationship soured in the autumn and opened the deal to early 2026. The decisive rift, he said, came when Emil Michel, the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, asked Anthropic to remove a clause prohibiting the use of the cloud to analyze bulk-collected commercial data — the capability at the center of the mass surveillance objection.
The fight was unusually personal as well as political. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X that Anthropic’s “true purpose is unambiguous. To seize veto power over operational decisions of the United States military. This is unacceptable.”
Trump branded Anthropic as a “radical leftist, woke company” and its employees as “leftist mad jobs”, while Michael called Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei a “liar” with a “God complex”. Ball also revealed on the podcast that rival entrepreneur Elon Musk – who runs a competing AI firm – had repeatedly attacked Anthropic on X.
The matter came to a head in February this year, when Hegseth threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act and designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk.”
That label is typically reserved for technology that is considered too dangerous to be placed anywhere in the U.S. military’s supply chain — it has been used against foreign companies like China’s Huawei over spying fears — and has never been used on an American company before.
Trump then announced on Truth Social that every federal agency would stop using anthropic technology: “We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and we will never do business with them again!” The US President warned the company to “be helpful during this phaseout period, otherwise I will use the full power of the presidency to force them into compliance, with serious civil and criminal consequences”.
Anthropic, whose Pentagon work is covered by the $200 million contract, said being designated a supply chain risk “would be legally inappropriate and would set a dangerous precedent”, adding: “Any threat or punishment from the War Department will not change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons”.
The Defense Department eventually signed an agreement with OpenAI, stating that it has the same red lines as Anthropic. OpenAI chief Sam Altman publicly supported his rival, telling staff in a note seen by the BBC that his company would reject military use of “technology such as domestic surveillance and autonomous offensive weapons”.
Anthropic subsequently filed two federal lawsuits against the Department of Defense on March 9, alleging that the ‘supply chain risk’ label was improperly applied and amounts to retaliation for the company’s protected speech on AI security, a violation of its due process rights.
“The Constitution does not permit the government to use its vast power to punish a company for its protected speech. No federal statute authorizes the actions taken here,” Anthropic argued, telling the court that the designation would cause “irreparable harm” and put “hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars in lost revenue” at risk.
The cases remain unresolved: A federal judge in San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction barring the cloud from enforcing the ban, but a DC appeals court denied Anthropic an emergency stay on April 8.
(with inputs from agencies)