Both models have been suspended after the United States has requested Anthropic to restrict the access of the AI model Fable and Mythos to foreign citizens abroad and in the United States. The external media, TechCrunch, commented that the incident was not just a single-company compliance adjustment, but could also be a realistic test of how the United States controlled frontier AI.

According to the article, Mythos has been treated by Anthropic as a high-risk cybersecurity model since its launch in April. Prior to the ban, only about 150 approved enterprises and government agencies had access to it. Anthropic was intended to allow the defence to first acquire tools for the reinforcement of software and services.

The prohibition leads to two things.

The first trigger was reported to have been the opening of Mythos access to a Korean telecommunications company through a limited cooperation programme. United States officials subsequently expressed concern about the Chinese connection. Several media outlets referred to SK Telecom as the company involved, but the company denied any association with China.

Another factor relates to model security. It was reported that the Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had warned the United States Government that the researchers had found a way to circumvent Fable 5 security. Anthropic does not agree with the term “breakout”, stating that the problem is limited and has been repaired.

According to the article, the United States Department of Commerce subsequently issued an export control directive. In part, Anthropic began to urgently restrict access to the relevant products within approximately 90 minutes of notification.

This kind of regulation has not worked well in history.

TechCrunch argues that the United States Government has tried many times in the past to limit the proliferation of critical network technologies through export controls, but the effect is not stable. The article mentions that in the 1990s the United States considered encryption software to be a sensitive technology and launched a criminal investigation against PGP developer Phil Zimmermann on suspicion of violating arms export controls.

Zimmermann then released the PGP source code in print, triggering a dispute later known as the “encrypted war”. Eventually, the investigation was dropped. According to the article, this result, instead, paved the way for the spread of end-to-end encryption technology, and the algorithm was later widely used in products such as Signal and WhatsApp.

Spy software control has failed several times.

The article also mentioned that, in the early 2010s, researchers had discovered that Western-made spy software had been used to silence dissidents in the Middle East. Since then, a number of countries have promoted the extension of the Wassenaar Arrangement to include monitoring and hacking software in dual-use technology export restrictions.

The article argues, however, that there are two types of problems with this mechanism: one is that not all countries are involved, for example, Israel is not part of the arrangement; and the other is that, even if they are involved, their implementation is inconsistent. It was reported, for example, that in Italy, Hacking Team had been allowed to obtain export licences, although the company had sold tools to repressive Governments.

It was also mentioned that some spy software companies would move their operations to less regulated areas to circumvent restrictions. Although the German investigation of FinFisher eventually led to the company ' s closure in 2022, such cases have not changed the overall proliferation trend.

According to TechCrunch, the impasse between Anthropic and the Trump government is not over. The article suggests two possibilities: the easing of restrictions by the United States Government in order to maintain the international competitiveness of its AI firms; and the need to obtain government approval before the United States AI company can provide future services to its overseas clients. The former implies the recognition that similar capabilities may still be available in overseas laboratories, while the latter would increase the cost of corporate compliance and reduce the profit margin.