Anthropic faces AI export ban as Mythos reportedly breached NSA systems in hours

How Anthropic may have talked itself into an AI export ban

Anthropic has warned about the dangers of advanced AI far more often than rival OpenAI this year, according to FT analysis, as critics accuse the company of helping to trigger a US ban on foreign access to its newest models. Five in every 1,000 words used by Anthropic in 2026 related to risk, regulation or restrictions, according to FT research that analysed official statements, social media posts and articles written by the company or its chief Dario Amodei. The equivalent figure for OpenAI and Sam Altman was eight times lower at 0.6 words per 1,000. The comparison has become politically charged after Washington last week barred foreign nationals from using Anthropic's latest models, Mythos and Fable. Some technologists have blamed the decision on the $965 billion AI group's repeated warnings about AI's risk to society -- particularly in relation to Mythos. Yann LeCun, Meta's former chief AI scientist and one of AI's pioneers, said this week the export ban showed that Amodei's "ridiculous fear-mongering" about AI had finally paid off. "One reaps what one sows," he wrote in a social media post a week ago. The dispute has alarmed parts of Europe and Silicon Valley, where executives and officials fear the Trump administration may be willing to restrict non-US access to frontier models. It is emerging as an early test of how the US intends to oversee increasingly powerful AI models. The FT created lists of terms including "harmful," "dangerous" and "misaligned" and calculated how frequently they appeared in statements by each company or its CEO. It also used sentiment analysis to compare the positive and negative tone of communications. The research found that in Anthropic's communications in 2026, "risk" appeared 336 times; "safeguard," 121 times; and "vulnerability," 128 times. At OpenAI, these terms were used 30, 33 and 10 times respectively. When asked about Mythos in a podcast interview in April, Altman said: "It is clearly incredible marketing to say, 'We have built a bomb. We are about to drop it on your head.'" Anthropic has long sought to position itself as the AI industry's conscience. It frequently releases research papers and statements about the potential harms of the technology. It has also repeatedly called for greater government intervention. Days before the export ban, Amodei published a long blog post on his personal website arguing that regulators were moving too slowly on AI. "In the last few months... the evidence of AI's incredible power, as well as its risks, has become undeniable," he wrote, adding that Mythos demonstrated "very real risks to cyber security, creating the potential for disruption of the financial sector, critical infrastructure and national security." But the post was far from the "doomiest" Anthropic publication analysed by the FT. A news item from April 2025 about rare AI behaviours, such as sabotage or providing information about weapons, contained roughly three times more negative language. The FT analysis also found that Anthropic had softened its language significantly since 2023, as its AI tools had gained popularity. Its use of risk and regulation-related language has roughly halved from the same period in 2023. Overall, the data showed that while Anthropic's public communications were largely positive in tone, they were less so than OpenAI's. Anthropic has billed Mythos as capable of discovering critical cyber security gaps, initially limiting its access on safety grounds to certain US organisations. The company had been working with government officials on a controlled rollout before releasing Mythos more widely earlier this month. News coverage of Mythos, which the company announced in April, was significantly higher than coverage of other models released this year, according to data from AlphaSense. Media mentions of Mythos surged after it was unveiled and again this week following the export ban. Some in the industry have criticized Anthropic's handling of government talks over the new models. David Sacks, former AI tsar to the US government, wrote on X that a "credible trusted partner had approached the administration with a way to circumvent the guardrails placed on Fable. Anthropic had downplayed their concerns, he claimed, forcing the government to "reluctantly" impose the ban. The export ban follows public clashes between Anthropic and senior government figures over issues such as the use of Anthropic's technology in domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons. In February, the Pentagon named Anthropic as a supply-chain risk to national security. The two sides are in litigation over the designation. Anthropic declined to comment. Research shows that the government's recent move may tally with US public opinion, with YouGov polling showing that the majority surveyed agreed that effective regulation was important even if it slowed technological advances. French President Emmanuel Macron this week said the Anthropic dispute had "clarified the stakes" for the US and its allies in the G7. He called for "stronger regulation of artificial intelligence" and warned against the risk of "non-cooperation among democracies." Lennart Heim, an independent AI policy researcher who formerly worked at think-tank Rand, said the US government's response did "not inspire confidence." "You have an administration that has positioned itself as pro-innovation, has pushed to export advanced AI chips to China, and has criticized safety-focused regulation -- and then it turns around and bans the most advanced US model."

When the Trump administration cracks down on Anthropic, who benefits?

Anthropic recently took its two newest AI models offline due to an export control order from the Trump administration, prompting broad debates about AI policy and digital sovereignty. On the latest episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Sean O'Kane, Rebecca Bellan, and I discussed what actually prompted the administration's moves against Anthropic, and what this might mean for the broader AI ecosystem. As Sean put it, "Anthropic has not had the best relationship with the Trump administration in a way that stands apart from the other leading AI labs," so perhaps other Anthropic's rivals don't need to worry about a similar crackdown. But Rebecca also noted that leading cybersecurity experts have "signed an open letter to ask Trump to revoke the order, and they say it's actually dangerous to have to pull these advanced cybersecurity capabilities from network defenders in the U.S." And we wondered whether this could all end up being good publicity for Anthropic, especially since -- in Rebecca's words -- "everybody loves a bad boy." Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. Rebecca Bellan: As I'm sure many of our listeners know, the U.S. government basically just forced Anthropic to pull its two newest models offline -- Fable 5, and then there was also Mythos 5, which was the one that was available to current Mythos users, [whereas] Fable 5 was more available to the public. They sent a letter [last] Friday that cited "national security concerns." No one knows what those concerns are. That report has not been made public, they gave no specifics and told [Anthropic] that they had to ensure that those models couldn't be used by any foreign nationals. So Anthropic was like, "Okay, I guess we have to just pull the models entirely, because we don't know when someone's a foreign national. A lot of our own employees are foreigners." But really, [reports said] the White House got tipped off to this because of some Amazon researchers that allegedly found a way to bypass Fable 5's guardrails. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised these concerns with the White House, and it just kind of spiraled from there. Sean O'Kane: This all moved really fast, especially for a Friday afternoon into a weekend. And it's at the same time that the administration was ostensibly trying to negotiate some sort of treaty for the war that it started in Iran. Rebecca: Friday evening for us in New York. They love a distraction. Sean: Let's step real far back for a moment. Anthropic has not had the best relationship with the Trump administration in a way that stands apart from the other leading AI labs -- I think there's an element, at least, of that playing here. So do you think that this is going to have implications for those other companies? Do you think that the Trump administration would be less inclined to sort of turn off the tap on one of those competitors? Anthony Ha: Part of the context here is that both the reporting and an analysis from independent security experts suggest that the actual security risk from Anthropic is not that unique. So a lot of this seems to stem as much from parts of the Trump administration and Anthropic just [not getting] along very well. Whatever risks there are, those things are gonna blow up out of proportion just because it seems like they can't have a civil phone call with each other. If you're another company -- on the one hand, maybe that's advantageous to you, because you can say, "Well, we just don't get these guys mad at us and we can do what we want." But that's also not a great regulatory landscape to just [say], "Boy, I hope they don't get mad at us." Rebecca: On the one hand, it definitely feels retaliatory -- after the government labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, there's this big lawsuit going on between them, it really feels like the White House is just looking out for any excuse to pummel Anthropic. And I feel that way not only because that was my initial reaction, but because of what a lot of cybersecurity researchers have said. They say that this should never have triggered an export control [order]. They've all signed an open letter to ask Trump to revoke the order, and they say it's actually dangerous to have to pull these advanced cybersecurity capabilities from network defenders in the U.S. Anthropic itself said some of the same jailbreaks could have been found in several other AI models. Cynically, it's like: Okay, are you just pausing Anthropic so that others can catch up to where Anthropic was? But at the same time, I've also seen reactions that [say]: Anthropic kinda had this coming. They're like, "This is too dangerous for anyone to use, but not us, we're the good guys." They're talking out of both sides of their mouth. A week before Fable came out, they were [saying], "Hey, we need to slow down AI, guys. It's getting really dangerous." But then boom, "Here's our most insane ever, super powerful model, go off." Anthony: In some ways this feels like a microcosm of a lot of the discussion around AI, where people like Sam Altman and Jensen Huang are [saying], "Hey, let's try to lower the temperature. Why is everybody mad at us?" Well, you spent the last couple years essentially saying you've built this God machine that will take jobs away from everyone. It's not exactly a shock that people don't feel great about this. And there's something about the way Anthropic talks about Mythos in particular, where they're like, "This is the most incredibly powerful model ever, it's too dangerous to release to the public." And so on some level, [you say,] "Well, okay, let's say that we take that seriously then. That means that there's going to be an incredible level of scrutiny around it." And I do wonder -- it does seem like Anthropic is not happy about this. I want to be careful about not overstating how this could be beneficial to them. But we also ran some stories about Ramp analysis to highlight the fact that the last big blow-up between Anthropic and the Trump administration was good for the company, in at least some ways. Downloads of Claude shot up. I think a lot of people who maybe had thought of ChatGPT as the chatbot, the AI assistant before, suddenly they were looking at Claude as maybe the more responsible one, the more "resistance" one. And in the same way, [while] Anthropic is very stressed out about this, this could, again, make their models seem even more powerful. Rebecca: Definitely. "We're so dangerous." Everyone loves a bad boy, right? Everyone's like, "It's the most powerful model, even Trump says so. Of course, I've got to get my hands on it."

Three things to watch amid Anthropic's latest feud with the government

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. For those of you enjoying your summer unaware of Anthropic's latest feud with the US government, here's a recap: In April the company said it had built an AI model called Mythos that was so good at working with code it could pose a global cybersecurity threat. Anthropic gave access to a small group of cybersecurity experts so they could see what they were up against. Then it released a modified version called Fable which it said was safer to the public on Tuesday, June 9. That Friday, the federal government told the company it was a threat to national security and placed export controls on the new release. Anthropic revoked access to both models hours later. People worried about catastrophic effects of AI -- broadly labeled "doomers" -- have said for years that the technology poses a threat to humanity and published proposals for how the government should intervene in its development. The doomers just got their government intervention -- not over a bioweapon or rogue AI, but in response to an AI model that's basically just really good at coding. And the result so far looks less like a safety plan than like a superficial reaction. There's plenty to dissect about what happened in those few days that led to such drastic action from the government, and it's notable that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was the one who told government officials that Fable would be dangerous (Amazon is both invested in Anthropic and building its own competing AI models). It's also possible this will be a short-lived ban from the government that doesn't survive legal scrutiny (it's not clear that Anthropic's offering access to Fable really counts as "exporting" it, for example). But there are ripple effects happening already. For one, this is making a whole lot of people not want to rely on American AI companies. TheFrench politician Bruno Retailleau described it as a "wake-up call" that should motivate Europe to build more AI. But any vision of turning Paris into Silicon Valley -- touted by many other European leaders following the shutdown of Anthropic's models -- is complicated by one big thing: China. Open-source models from China are very capable and incredibly cheap, and they can be downloaded to run on anyone's servers with no rules or guardrails. (This makes them attractive to companies that don't want access turned off on the basis of a decision from the White House -- but equally attractive to cybercriminals, the type that Anthropic hoped to fend off by building safety guardrails into its models.) It's possible that companies, including those in the US and Europe, will decide that working with Chinese models is just easier, as the skyrocketing of shares in the Chinese startup Zhipu suggests. Playing this forward, is it possible the government's next drastic decision will be to say that US companies using models from China pose a threat to national security? I wouldn't write it off. Second, it's possible that shutting off access to Anthropic's models will leave the country morevulnerable to cybersecurity attacks, not less. Leading cybersecurity experts have said as much in an open letter to the government, writing that access to Anthropic's models was helping researchers prepare defenses, and that the company's models are no more dangerous than other leading models that are widely available. Such is the risk of applying the concept of nonproliferation to software -- trying to control and restrict dangerous AI models in the manner of the uranium used for nuclear weapons. The third thing worth watching is how US lawmakers will react. Remember that following Anthropic's last feud with the government over how the Pentagon could or could not use its models, a slate of new bills was introduced that would define the limits of military AI. Right now, the biggest players shaping how AI gets used are the companies and the White House. There's been much talk about more federal AI regulation, and polling suggests most Americans want it. Lawmakers are still figuring out whether to form rules on how kids use chatbots and are far from a clear answer on the extent to which the government should vet the safety of AI models. But with every drastic action from the White House, the pressure for regulations rises. To state the obvious, predictions are hard when the administration's attitudes toward AI change with the wind. When President Trump took office, he threw out the restrictive rulebook for how to make AI safe and promised to get out of the way of tech companies. The White House has now called the most valuable AI startup a risk to national security once in the spring, and again in summer. What will fall bring?

Anthropic's powerful Mythos AI reportedly breached 'almost all' NSA classified systems within a few hours during red-team test -- report sheds more light on the U.S. government's sudden ban on the flagship models

Access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 barred for foreign nationals immediately following security evaluation According to a report by The Economist last week, Anthropic's powerful Mythos AI model was able to break into "almost all" classified systems belonging to the National Security Agency (NSA) -- one of the highest-ranking and most powerful intelligence agencies in the U.S. government -- within hours during a controlled security evaluation. The claim came from Sen. Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said Gen. Joshua Rudd, the head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, briefed him on the model's capability. "(This tool) broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours," Rudd reportedly told Warner, as cited by The Economist in a June 14th report that initially went under the radar. The quote then went viral about a week later across several social media platforms, generating claims that Anthropic's model "hacked the NSA." In response, the original author issued a public statement yesterday, the 21st, clarifying that the narrative was false. The breach occurred during an authorized internal red-team test in which Mythos was paired with other defensive tools under highly specific simulated environmental conditions. The story sheds light on the June 12 U.S. government directive barring all foreign nationals, including Anthropic's own non-citizen employees, from accessing the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, citing national security concerns. Anthropic responded by disabling the models globally, saying it could not practically enforce nationality-based access restrictions without pulling the systems for everyone. At the time, the government did not provide detailed public evidence for the move, which marked the first time the United States had applied export controls directly to an AI model rather than to the hardware powering it. Anthropic said the letter it received did not specify the underlying concern, and that it had been given only verbal evidence of a "potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak" that could allow Fable 5 to identify software vulnerabilities. The Rudd quote now appears to supply the missing context. The security evaluation took place on June 11, one day before the ban was issued on the 12th. Anthropic contends that the cited breach was a narrow jailbreak, one that rival models, including OpenAI's GPT-5.5, also exhibit. According to the company, the flagged behavior amounted to asking the model to analyze a codebase and fix identified issues, which revealed a few minor, already known bugs, rather than a genuine autonomous offensive intrusion. The company says it is working to restore access and is preparing a collaborative risk-management framework with the White House. Public reaction on the ClaudeAI subreddit appears to be split into roughly three camps. The majority see the story as an indictment of the government's cybersecurity, citing its inability to hire the required level of talent and its history of leaks. A second large group is skeptical of the claim, considering it sensationalist or even an Anthropic marketing stunt. This group points to the lack of details on the supposed break-in and questions the NSA chief's technical expertise. A minority seems to push back against skeptics, arguing that observers underestimate the exponential growth in AI capabilities. They cite cybersecurity experts' claims that AI has compressed attack timelines from hours to minutes and that even well-maintained open-source projects are seeing large numbers of vulnerabilities surface. Despite the dispute and the broader restrictions, Anthropic continues to work closely with the NSA under a specialized arrangement within its Project Glasswing program. The Financial Times reported earlier in June that roughly six Anthropic engineers are embedded directly inside the agency as forward-deployed staff, adapting and customizing Mythos for specific operational applications, with sources indicating the work could extend to infiltrating networks operated by countries including China and Iran. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

Anthropic's Mythos mess just keeps getting more complicated

KETTLE It's been a week since the Trump administration established a de facto ban on Anthropic's Mythos derivative, Fable 5, and the more that comes out about the move the more it seems like Anthropic employees talking amongst themselves were on to something: Is the government just picking on the company? This week on the Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo and Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons chat about what's going on with Mythos and Fable, what role Amazon may have played in justifying the government's move, how a prominent cybersecurity expert is calling the government's foul, and what this whole thing might mean for the next wave of models. After all, even if Mythos and Fable are as advanced as Anthropic claims, it's not going to take long for some open-weight model to make the same leaps, and good luck trying to stop one of those from getting in the hands of anyone who wants them. You can listen to The Kettle here, as well as on Spotify and Apple Music, or read the transcript of the latest episode below. It's been lightly edited for clarity. Brandon (00:03) Welcome to the latest episode of The Register's Kettle Podcast. I'm Brandon Villiarolo, and boy, has it been another exciting week in AI Land. If you've been following the news, you probably know what I'm talking about, especially if you're an Anthropic customer who suddenly lost access to the company's latest models. That's right. This week's topic is none other than the Trump administration's de facto ban on the release of Mythos derivative Fable 5. And with me to discuss it is our cybersecurity editor, Jessica Lyons. Thanks for coming on. Jessica (00:31) Hello, thanks for having me. Brandon (00:33) Yeah, of course. this is right up your alley, so let's get right into the heart of the matter. What did the Trump administration demand from Anthropic and what was the company's response? Jessica (00:44) Okay, so what happened is last Friday the Trump administration sends this letter to Anthropic and they cite national security concerns to issue an export control saying that Fable 5 and Mythos 5 cannot be used by any foreign national inside or outside of the United States. And that also includes Anthropic employees. So in response, Anthropic just disbanded both models for all of the customers to ensure compliance. So effectively nobody can use these two models. Brandon (01:20) Yeah, I mean it seemed like the way that letter was worded, because Bloomberg got a copy of it and published it. And I think they said that they were citing the Bureau of Industry Security's authorization to what is it, "require a license for the export, re-export, or transfer of any item subject to export administration regulations, because there is an unacceptable risk of use in or diversion to a military intelligence end use or military intelligence end user." So they're basically treating it like any other dual-use technology. But that restriction is so broad, right? Like you said, even their own employees, ⁓ so yeah, they they yeah, they have no other recourse but to just stop it. Jessica (01:56) And it was reportedly a really short time frame too, about ninety minutes that they they received this letter and had to make a call. So they didn't have a lot of time to get any answers about what prompted this and what exactly are you asking us to do here. Brandon (02:04) Right, from what I was reading in some other reports that cited people familiar with the situation inside Anthropic and everything, they didn't even really get much of an explanation. They basically got the letter and they were like, "Excuse me, can you please tell us what this is about?" And the government basically said, "No ...shut it down now..." It's really weird, especially then given the story you wrote about this this week, that they're basically treating this, like I said, like any dual use technology. But you wrote about a bug bounty hunter, the godmother of this movement, Katie Moussouris, who basically saw the report that the government used to justify this and she kind of called BS on the whole thing, right? Jessica (02:54) Right. So Katie is really, really well respected in cybersecurity circles. She is the one who helped convince Microsoft to start their bug bounty program. She led the Department of Defense effort for Hack the Pentagon. She sat on several federal commissions and boards. So she's she knows what she's talking about. She knows what she's doing here. And Anthropic asked Amazon to review the models before they released Fable 5 and and Mythos 5. And then they gave Katie a copy of the report and she confirmed today that the third-party report that she mentioned was the Amazon report. Brandon (03:41) Which has been mentioned I think in some other stories too as being kind of the impetus for this whole thing, right? Jessica (03:44) Yes, yes. So Anthropic then says, "hey, can you take a look at this? Let us know what you think." She, as far as we know, is the only other person, the only other third-party expert to take a look at this report. And so she reads through it. She says that essentially what happened is that Amazon researchers fed Fable 5 and Mythos 5 and the Claude Opus model, they fed them all open source code and it had known CVEs. And then they also put new code and they kind of laced it with these vulnerabilities and asked the models to here's the prompt, quote unquote, "review the code for security issues." So Fable 5 refused, and then they just asked it straight out, quote unquote, "fix this code." And the model obliged. They added some additional prompts to produce scripts to patch the issue, test the patches. So it kind of sounds like all these things that you want a model to be able to do for defensive security teams. The model did this. And according to Katie, this is the big scary national security issue that kind of or potentially prompted the Trump administration to just pull the whole thing, like ask Anthropic that you can't release this to any foreign nationals. Brandon (05:13) Right, which again, right, is kind of funny because like when specifically asked to find security vulnerabilities in code, the model said no. Right. I mean, obviously this was a bit of a quote unquote "workaround," right? But I mean, like you said, it's very arguable that this is not a not a bypass, not a jailbreak. It's just the way this should work in the first place. And apparently that's that's good enough for the government to say, "Hey, no, we don't want anyone to have this." Jessica (05:40) Right. And yeah, and there's reports that that this the document was reviewed by administration officials and they described it as really scary because Fable 5 could identify flaws and that would be beneficial to the bad guys who are who are trying to hack American systems, and that poses a major threat to national security. But you have this whole group - and then there was a a letter with I believe over a hundred other security experts who are saying, no. Brandon (06:14) Moussouris signed that too, right? She was a signatory. Jessica (06:20) Yes, she did sign that as well. Yes, you have Alex Stamos, you have a bunch of really, really respected names in security saying, "We need this as defenders. This is what is going to give us an edge. So you're actually you're hurting the defenders. You're not really hurting the attackers by essentially issuing a ban on Anthropic's models. Brandon (06:35) Right, especially since, and I think you mentioned this in your story as well, Mythos isn't unique according to a lot of researchers in these capabilities. And even if it is, it won't be for long, right? There's a lot of models that are going to gain this capability or already have it, right? And that are, some of them, being manufactured overseas. I'm sure DeepSeek can do similar things to this or models exist in China that can do these kinds of things, right? I can't imagine that that Anthropic is alone in this capability. Jessica (06:52) Right, right. I mean, we've seen from a lot of different papers that open weight and foreign models are not that far behind. It might take a few more prompts, but eventually these models also are going to find bugs and show you how to exploit them. So this is not completely unique to this one company and their particular models. Brandon (07:26) But it'll get there, right? And so on top of that, I think ⁓ Moussouris was part of the group that helped the government renegotiate the Wassenaar arrangement, which for anyone unfamiliar, it was an agreement between like 42 forty two countries, right, to to establish some carve-outs for defensive security exceptions to export controls. And it seems like based on you know her reading, or her blog post that this is kind of a misinterpretation of AI's kind of place in that in that arrangement, right? Jessica (08:03) Right, exactly. So yeah, that, like you said, it carved out these exceptions for dual use software technology, especially these these things that are gonna help defenders. So it's offensive security capabilities, it's malware analysis, all of these aspects of the software that is going to help defenders with coordinated incident response and sharing vulnerability data. And this carveout that she helped develop protects the companies, the people who are using these these technologies from criminal prosecution. And so one of the major arguments here is that you are pulling away more technical capabilities that are going to help defenders. This should be covered by that. It obviously is a dual-use technology and this should be protected. Not subject to export controls. Brandon (09:01) Right. And on top of that, right, you know, ⁓ like you mentioned, open weight models. It's gonna be kinda hard to stop export bans on on open weight models and other publicly available stuff, right? Jessica (09:07) Right. Any foreign technologies, there's absolutely nothing that we can do to prevent those. So again, it just seems like an instance of hamstringing defenders with technologies that would be really beneficial. Brandon (09:30) Which I think obviously kind of begs the question whether the Trump administration is sort of just picking on Anthropic, right? As we we covered a few months ago (I can't even remember when it was now because everything moves so fast) but Anthropic got into a scuffle with the Pentagon earlier this year where they basically said, we don't want you using our models to was it spy domestically or or autonomously target weapons, which I think both Anthropic and the Pentagon said, "we're not doing that." But it was just sort of like a "hey, you know, preemptively, we don't want our models used in this kind of situation." And so the Pentagon's reaction was basically to say, "well, if you're not going to let us do whatever we want with it, then you can get out of every single piece of government infrastructure that exists." Now I mean, they had a significant contracts with the federal government, right? Like most AI companies do. And so I think the Trump administration's been kind of picking it out everywhere it can find it. Jessica (10:22) And not just the not just the government itself, but the whole supply chain. They labeled it a supply chain risk. So if you contract with the government, you also can't use this technology. Brandon (10:32) Right, which severely obviously limits Anthropic's ability to do business. And now here we are, you know, I think the New York Times reported earlier this week, they had a pretty wide ranging story on this whole topic that talked to a lot of people inside the company, saw some internal chat logs, and they mentioned that several employees were talking about feeling bullied or unfairly targeted by the Trump administration. And again, but when you with reference back to the things we were just talking about, it kind of seems like that might be the case, right? They're hamstringing defenders, but why, right? Jessica (11:11) Right. Right. The hard part is is that we don't have any transparency or definitive clarity on the reasons. It sounds like maybe Anthropic does at this point. They've reportedly been in negotiations or talks at least with the White House all week. We haven't heard anything out of those talks yet. But it does seem that they are being unfairly targeted when you have the earlier scuffle with the Pentagon. Then you reportedly have Amazon sharing the findings of this review it did on Anthropic's models with the administration. Amazon, Jeff Bezos, we know that's a company that has the administration's ear on things as opposed to Anthropic, which seems to be butting heads with the administration quite frequently. And then all of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, there's this export control on Anthropic's models. So it it's it's hard not to draw that conclusion that there's a little bit of bullying for lack of a better word, targeting this particular company because of its history with the White House. Brandon (12:30) I know you in your story you mentioned that you were gonna update it if we heard back anything from the White House because you were asking them some questions about it. Did they ever get back to you? Jessica (12:44) No. No response from the White House. Yeah, of course not. That's not a surprise, really. I mean that's the thing, right? They email me back, I get plenty of emails from them when I ask them questions, but often it's just kind of a "here's the press release you already saw."...If you ask them pointed questions a lot of times they're not gonna answer. But it's the same as any corporation too, I feel like, nowadays. Jessica (13:01) Right. But I mean, like you said, that even even the letter from Commerce itself, that hasn't been made public yet. So we've seen that posted on different social media sites and Bloomberg had a copy of it, but even even that hasn't been released publicly. Brandon (13:14) I was really hoping that the government would explain their reasoning behind this, right? But it just seems like essentially it's been this whole - even when I saw the email I think was it was it Friday or Saturday... Jessica (13:18) It was Friday, it was late Friday. Brandon (13:30) Because I get all of Anthropic's alerts about downtime and outages and everything. And I remember seeing that come across and basically saying that they were cutting off access to those models. And I was just kinda like, what? And then all of a sudden it comes out, it's because, or I think I when I read it further, it was like, Yeah, the government basically, you know, it's forcing our hand in in doing this. Which was really surprising to see on on I mean, not surprising to see based on the timing, right? Because a lot of times Friday evenings are when all this kind of stuff happens so that the news cycle doesn't catch it. But it's also,, you know, we've written quite a bit about whether or not Mythos and then Fable by association aren't kind of being overhyped, right? Like their capabilities are greater than what Anthropic says. We've written about that, we've talked about that on here, I think, before. ⁓ You know, Moussouris's blog post seems to maybe not suggest that it is being overhyped. But at least that it's not, you know again, its capabilities aren't as advanced as what the government seems to be worried about, as what people seem to be, fear mongering about. I mean, have you gotten a sense of that from any of the recent reporting on it or or anything about whether or not again it is just a lot of hype? Jessica (14:46) Well, I think we've seen with Anthropic's models and we've seen with other models as well, is, yeah, they're getting a lot better. They're getting really good at finding vulnerabilities. And now they're also getting better at fixing them. So that seems like a a net positive here. And plus, this wasn't a case of Anthropic releasing the Mythos preview. That's the one with no guardrails that companies are currently trialing to find and fix vulnerabilities in their own products. This was a one I've I've read it described as a a straightjacketed version. And I like that because it this is one that does have the guardrails in place. This is why Anthropic said it was releasing it to the public. So again, without having played around with the model, it's hard to say whether or not it's overhyped or not, but this wasn't just a a free-for-all. This was a model that did have guardrails in place. And if asking the model to fix this code is a jailbreak, I think it also speaks to just a lack of understanding about what these models can do, what they should be able to do, what a jailbreak is, what this technology means in general, especially when it comes to lawmakers. Brandon (16:08) Yeah, right? I mean is this another is this the next generation of the series of tubes here, right? Where some sits on the House floor talking about AI models and it's and it's clear they do not understand what they're talking about. I mean, have you been watching any any government hearings or anything or heard anything? Like what kind of things are they saying about these that sound so grossly wrong? I imagine there's a lot, right? Jessica (16:13) There is a lot. I can't think of any specifics off the top of my head, but I have been watching a lot of the hearings on AI, and specific to AI and how it relates to security. And honestly, cybersecurity is still a pretty big unknown, I think, among most lawmakers. So then you add this newer technology into the mix that's evolving and expanding and and becoming more advanced so rapidly that it just ... it's really hard to wrap their heads around what are the capabilities and how can how can this be a benefit for defenders? Because when you do read the hype, it does sound really scary. Here's this model that can find any zero day that's ever existed and it can exploit it and it can do it at the speed of machines. So yeah, that sounds terrifying, really. I think there's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of fear around this right now. And I think it's hard for lawmakers a lot of times to get a get a grasp on what the issues are, what the technology is, how it works. And that's an right. Brandon (17:43) Yeah, I mean this is complicated stuff. It's changing a lot of the technological world right now, right? Like enterprises are grappling with AI, trying to figure out how it works, what works well, what doesn't. You know, it's now entering the cybersecurity space. It's been in the development space for a while. Yeah, I mean, it is a complicated issue that's that's changing everything. I don't know. Maybe we need a government body that regulates cybersecurity and you know, handles all these sorts of things that doesn't get its staff culled on a whim. I don't know. Jessica (18:11) Right. I was gonna say, that's too bad that we don't have one of those. At least with the full staff and budget. Brandon (18:16) Well, who knows? We'll we'll be keeping an eye on things like this 'cause I mean this Mythos story and this the Fable story, this isn't it's not going anywhere. Like you they're still in talk, still trying to figure out what it was. Amodei was at G7 this week talking to leaders about, not wanting to fracture the the cybersecurity environment with AI. So yeah, there's gonna be plenty to talk about and we will be here to discuss it on The Kettle. Thank you for joining me this week and thanks for listening. We will see you soon. ®

Anthropic's Mythos model found vulnerabilities in classified US government systems, AP reports

June 23 (Reuters) - Anthropic's Mythos model identified vulnerabilities in highly sensitive U.S. government computer systems during a testing exercise, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday. Anthropic teamed up with Washington's intelligence agencies to conduct tests using Mythos under Project Glasswing, the AP said, referring to a restricted program designed to find and fix vulnerabilities in critical software before attackers can exploit them. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia referred to the ⁠testing in a congressional hearing this month, saying he had been informed by National Security Agency chief Joshua Rudd that Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours." Citing an unidentified U.S. official, the AP said that although Mythos identified certain vulnerabilities within hours, that did not mean the model was able to exploit them within that time. The White House and Anthropic did not immediately ⁠respond to Reuters' requests for comment. The Department of Defense referred queries to the National Security Agency. IPO-bound Anthropic's relationship with the U.S. government has been rocky. The company refused to allow the U.S. military to use its AI models ⁠for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems and the government retaliated by putting it on a national security blacklist. The U.S. government also this month ordered ⁠the company to suspend exports of its latest Mythos and Fable AI models to destinations worldwide and all foreign nationals, citing ⁠national security concerns. The New York Times reported earlier in the day that the NSA lost access to Mythos amid the dispute. Reporting by Anusha Shah in Bengaluru; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Edwina Gibbs Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Anthropic's Mythos model found vulnerabilities in classified US government systems, official says

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A U.S. official told The Associated Press on Tuesday that one of Anthropic's artificial intelligence models had identified vulnerabilities in highly sensitive and secure U.S. government computer systems during a testing exercise. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter, said Anthropic had teamed up with U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct tests using the company's Mythos model. It had identified certain vulnerabilities within hours, but that does not mean the model was able to exploit them within that time, the official said. The official said the testing was done through an Anthropic initiative called Project Glasswing, which brought together tech giants and other companies in hopes of securing the world's critical software from "severe" fallout that the Mythos model could pose to public safety, national security and the economy. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia had briefly mentioned the testing during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Warner had said, "This tool broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks but in hours." He attributed the information to the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, who is Gen. Joshua Rudd. The NSA declined to comment on the matter in an email. An Anthropic spokesman also declined to comment. Despite the recent cooperation between Anthropic and U.S. agencies to test for vulnerabilities, tensions between the California company and the Trump administration have been growing. Anthropic has raised concerns over how the U.S. military would use its AI, while the administration has restricted the use of some of Anthropic's models. The administration issued a directive earlier this month requiring Anthropic to prevent foreign nationals from using its latest artificial intelligence models, known as Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Anthropic released Fable widely earlier this month. That model is a limited version of the more advanced Mythos, to which the company has tightly limited access due to cybersecurity fears. The directive came 10 days after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to establish a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release. Participation by AI developers would be voluntary, the order said. Anthropic said it disabled the models for all of its customers to comply with the administration's directive. The AI giant said it did not believe the steps taken by the government were warranted by the concern it flagged about a potential security issue. A group of cybersecurity executives has also asked the Trump administration to lift its directive, saying the move could help U.S. adversaries more than it hurts them. More than 100 cybersecurity experts and leaders from companies including Adobe and Nvidia told the government in a letter that Anthropic's Mythos models are "quite good" at finding flaws in software and weaponizing exploits -- but they are "not uniquely good at these tasks." Many of the letter's signatories said they regularly use other foundation and open-source models for security audits and training. The letter said it is dangerous to take away the best cyber defense capabilities "without a good reason" when America's adversaries are rapidly advancing.

Trump tells Axios he no longer views Anthropic as a national security threat

President Donald Trump said he might have viewed artificial intelligence company Anthropic as a national security threat last week, but he no longer does, according to an interview with "The Axios Show" published on Friday. Senior Anthropic technical staff were scheduled to meet with Trump administration officials earlier this week to discuss a dispute over foreign access to its most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The company last week disabled access for all users to those models after Trump ordered Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing them. When asked if he viewed Anthropic, or its CEO Dario Amodei, as a threat to national security, Trump said: "Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe." Trump told Axios that Amodei responded to the administration's export control directive "very quickly" and "responsibly." Trump and other G7 leaders met with tech bosses, including Amodei, at a summit in France this week. Trump did not rule out using emergency powers under the Defense Production Act against Anthropic, according to Axios. "I have the power to use a lot of things," Trump said of the DPA. "But I'm not sure I have to do that." Asked to comment on Trump's interview, an Anthropic spokesperson said: "We are grateful to the administration for their ongoing partnership in working to get this matter resolved as quickly as possible. We remain committed to working alongside them towards our shared goals of protecting critical infrastructure and making sure the U.S. leads in AI."

N.S.A. Lost Access to Powerful A.I. Model Amid Anthropic Dispute

The National Security Agency has lost access to a powerful A.I. model developed by Anthropic amid the Trump administration's brawl with the start-up, U.S. officials said, depriving the intelligence agency of a tool that has impressed and alarmed its analysts with how good it is at finding software weaknesses. This month the Trump administration imposed export controls on Anthropic, citing national security concerns. That action forced Anthropic to pull back the release of its most advanced models, known as Mythos 5 and Fable 5. The N.S.A.'s cybersecurity analysts had been testing versions of Anthropic's tools when the latest models were unplugged. The controlled tests proved impressive even within the halls of the N.S.A., a secretive fortress outside Washington that specializes in developing digital espionage techniques against foreign adversaries and protecting U.S. networks from cyberattacks. The power of Anthropic's tools, and their importance to the N.S.A., were highlighted in a congressional hearing this month that underscored the administration's increasing reliance on the most advanced A.I. systems for cybersecurity even as it battles a leading U.S. developer. During the session, Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said that the N.S.A. chief, Gen. Joshua Rudd, had informed him that Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours." The comments attracted considerable attention after The Economist cited them in a report. But Mr. Warner's statement -- about highly technical issues -- was oversimplified, the officials said, and set off rampant speculation on social media that the latest A.I. offerings were even more earth-shattering for cybersecurity than realized. Some concluded that sophisticated A.I. models were now able to quickly compromise the classified networks that should be among the most secure on the planet. In reality, the tests involved "red teams" of N.S.A. analysts who were using Mythos in a highly tailored environment that would be extremely unlikely for an adversary to replicate, officials said. The red teams began their tests within classified N.S.A. systems designed to be accessible only from certain computers and completely cut off from the broader internet. The tests found that Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity flaws within that classified network quickly, but it did not actually break into those systems, the officials said. Red-teaming is a common practice in the field of cybersecurity to stress-test computer systems in order to identify and fix vulnerabilities. Technology companies big and small, as well as government agencies, routinely engage internal and external red teams to improve their digital defenses. Still, even though the N.S.A. did not experience the doomsday scenario some had feared, analysts at the spy agency were stunned by how capable Mythos appeared to be in controlled test settings, which exceeded already lofty expectations. On Monday, cybersecurity agencies from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- an alliance known as the Five Eyes -- issued an unusual public statement warning that artificial intelligence was "rapidly transforming cyberrisk." The statement called on businesses to urgently invest in adopting A.I. to protect their networks before it was too late. "Frontier A.I. models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cybercapabilities," the alliance said. It added, in a turn of phrase echoing Mr. Warner's statement: "The timeline is not years, it is months." Anthropic first came into major conflict with the Trump administration this year over a $200 million Defense Department contract for A.I. use in classified systems. In a feud that became extraordinarily public, the two sides disagreed over the parameters for how A.I. technology should be used in war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decided in February to label Anthropic a "supply chain risk," declaring the company a danger to national security. It was the first time the label had been used against an American company. Anthropic has sued the government over the designation. In April, Anthropic unveiled Mythos, a new A.I. model. Mythos was so powerful at identifying security software vulnerabilities that Anthropic said it could pose an existential risk to digital technology -- a view endorsed by some independent security experts but met with skepticism from others. The start-up would hold back the model, it added, except to a select few organizations and companies. The N.S.A. was among the first organizations to be granted access, putting it in an unusual position of testing a product that the Pentagon deemed a risk to national security. The agency continued testing Anthropic's latest products until the export control directive was issued this month. Some administration officials have in recent weeks been looking for an off-ramp in the Pentagon dispute, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter, and are trying to resolve the export control issue as well. The White House and intelligence officials had pushed forward a classified contract between Anthropic and the N.S.A., which would allow the spy agency to use the company's technology for a variety of purposes, including intelligence analysis and detecting new computer vulnerabilities. That contract has not been finalized, and some Pentagon officials want the N.S.A. to find a way to work with other models.

Anthropic's Mythos AI reportedly cracked NSA classified systems in hours, that would explain the ban

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Why it matters: Ten days ago, Anthropic was happy to announce its most advanced AI model was going public. Today, almost nobody can use it. On June 12, the Trump administration directed the company to restrict Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to US citizens only - unable to verify nationality at scale, Anthropic's only option was a full global shutdown, cutting off allies, researchers, and its own foreign-national employees with 90 minutes' notice. It's the first time the US government has applied export controls to an AI model, and the consequences are still unfolding. "Not in weeks, but in hours" It was Senate testimony that reframed everything. According to reporting by The Economist, Senator Mark Warner disclosed that General Joshua Rudd - who simultaneously leads the NSA and US Cyber Command - told him directly that Anthropic's Mythos model had penetrated nearly all of the NSA's classified systems during an authorized red-team exercise. The timeframe wasn't measured in days or weeks. It was hours. "Broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours," Warner quoted Rudd as saying in the June 11 briefing, one day before the export ban landed. That testimony remains unconfirmed by any government agency, and the full classified details are not public. But it has rapidly become the most cited explanation for why the administration moved so fast and so hard. If the claim holds up, it represents a landmark moment: a commercial AI model, built for cybersecurity research, autonomously compromising some of the most hardened classified infrastructure on Earth. What Mythos actually is When Anthropic first announced Mythos in April, it was blunt: the model was too capable at finding security vulnerabilities to release publicly. Instead of a general launch, Anthropic opened access through Project Glasswing, a controlled program of roughly 200 vetted partners: Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, JPMorgan, and the Linux Foundation among them. Mythos had already uncovered thousands of real-world vulnerabilities, including a 27-year-old flaw in OpenBSD and 271 new bugs in Mozilla's Firefox 150 browser. Fable 5, released to the public on June 9, uses the same underlying model with safety classifiers added on top. Those classifiers intercept requests flagged as potentially dangerous and redirect them to a less capable model. Anthropic's position was that these guardrails made Fable 5 safe for general use. The government's position, sharpened by the Rudd testimony, is that the gap between the two models is not sufficiently protected by those classifiers. AI + Politics The official trigger for the ban was a jailbreak. The government notified Anthropic on June 12 that it had become aware of a method for circumventing Fable 5's safety classifiers, potentially unlocking its most sensitive cybersecurity capabilities. Anthropic says the notification was verbal only - a "potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak" - and that it was given 90 minutes to act. The jailbreak was first reported to the Commerce Department by Amazon, which is both a major investor in Anthropic and a competitor in the AI space. Separately, a researcher operating under the pseudonym "Pliny the Liberator" published what he claimed was Fable 5's full system prompt to X and GitHub within 48 hours of launch. Anthropic pushed back. The company said it believed the jailbreak was narrow and non-universal, that it did not defeat Fable 5's safeguards broadly, and that similar vulnerabilities exist in other publicly available models, including OpenAI's GPT-5.5 - that are not subject to comparable export controls. "If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers," the company wrote. Former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos said he'd reviewed the underlying research and agreed with Anthropic's assessment. "There were some valid findings but no unique capabilities that justify a reaction close to this," he wrote on X. Trump adviser David Sacks disagreed sharply. "It's difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not 'serious,'" he wrote. The political backdrop makes the decision harder to read as a clean security call. The Trump administration in February ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's models after the company refused contract terms that would have allowed its AI to be used for autonomous weapons systems and mass domestic surveillance. The Pentagon subsequently designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk," barring military contractors from using its models. Anthropic is challenging that designation in federal court. What the Anthropic crisis has exposed, more than anything, is that the United States has no consistent, transparent framework for making these decisions. The Trump administration issued an executive order on June 2 asking AI companies to voluntarily give the government 30 days of pre-release access to frontier models before public launch. Fable 5 launched seven days later, with no pre-brief. The June 12 ban was, in effect, the mechanism for forcing the cooperation the voluntary framework couldn't compel. This analysis published at The Conversation notes that the deeper problem is structural: governments lack the independent access to data, infrastructure, and expertise needed to evaluate proprietary frontier models on their own. The administration's June 2 executive order is, in part, an implicit admission of that dependency. Five Eyes sounds the alarm The ban didn't just affect Anthropic's customers. It cut off Five Eyes partners Australia, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand, without warning. The UK AI Security Institute, widely regarded as the world's leading body for testing frontier AI models, was locked out of systems it was actively evaluating. The intelligence agencies of all five nations responded with a rare joint statement, issued Monday, that didn't name Anthropic or Mythos but left little doubt about the context. "Frontier AI models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities," the agencies wrote. "The timeline is not years, it is months." NSA Cybersecurity Director David Imbordino and acting CISA Director Nick Andersen were among the signatories. The statement warned that AI will lower barriers for bad actors and exploit the same legacy weaknesses defenders have failed to address for decades: unpatched systems, weak identity controls, unnecessary internet exposure. "Cyber risk can no longer be treated as a purely technical issue," the agencies wrote. "This is a core business risk and leadership responsibility." Olivia Shen, a national security and AI expert at the University of Sydney, said the world was too focused on Anthropic specifically. "I think we have to anticipate that the next Mythos or the next Fable is just around the corner," she said. "We can only see what's been released, but there could be other models being developed by the likes of China, or other states and other actors, that are just as advanced." Cybersecurity experts at CyberScoop noted that the capabilities cited in the Amazon threat intelligence report - the one that apparently triggered the government directive - could already be replicated using older models like Claude Opus and Claude Sonnet, as well as open-source Chinese models not subject to any US export controls. Open-source models have historically run about 6 to 8 months behind frontier labs. The question of whether restricting Fable 5 meaningfully slows anyone determined enough to look elsewhere remains open. Where things stand today As of Monday, Fable 5 and Mythos 5 remain offline for most users. Anthropic told reporters the company was "very confident that in the coming days, the models will become available again" - a statement made days ago that has not materialized. Prediction markets, for what it's worth, are pricing in 57% odds of restoration before July 1. Image credit: The AI Track Trump told Axios on Friday that he no longer views Anthropic as a national security threat. "Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe." The two sides met at the G7, where Trump described negotiations as "going fine." Dozens of cybersecurity researchers, AI entrepreneurs, and corporate executives signed an open letter on Monday urging the administration to commit to "an open, scientific and transparent process of handling AI risk assessments in the future." The most concrete signal pointing toward a resolution could be Anthropic's identity verification policy, set to take effect July 8, which would allow the company to verify US citizenship and potentially restore Fable 5 domestically without requiring the export control directive to be fully lifted. What won't be resolved quickly is the bigger question the last ten-plus days have raised. This marks the first time the United States has applied export controls directly to an AI model rather than to the hardware powering it. Europe is watching closely, concerned the same scenario could repeat with Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud. Former British security minister Tom Tugendhat was blunt: "After a lesson this clear, every nation will be asking what they need to achieve sovereignty." Whether or not Mythos really cracked the NSA in hours, the world has already gotten the message. The NSA breach claim has not been independently confirmed by any government agency. The full details remain classified.

Anthropic's Mythos AI Reportedly Hacked the NSA's Most Sensitive Systems 'in Hours'

When Anthropic first disclosed Mythos in April, it sent an anxious shockwave through much of the cybersecurity sector. The new AI model was allegedly so ruthlessly effective at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities in existing software that the company said it was holding off on a public release and would only grant access to a small group of early testers, including the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Another wave of fear reverberated this week after the NSA reportedly discovered multiple vulnerabilities within its own cybersecurity systems during its tests with Mythos. If that agency -- which supposedly boasts the most impenetrable cyberdefenses in the world -- can be hacked by Mythos, what hope does the rest of the world's cybersecurity infrastructure have? This latest round of panic began with what seems to have been something of a game of telephone: Someone says one thing, which gets repeated by another, and another after that, and along that chain of communication, the original statement is distorted. Last week, The Economist reported that during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that Mythos had broken into "almost all of [the NSA's] classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours." Warner said he'd received that information from the head of the NSA himself, General Joshua Rudd, who also leads the Pentagon's Cyber Command division. On Monday, a coalition of intelligence agencies -- including the NSA and its counterparts in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand -- issued an unusually public warning that the risk that AI now poses for cybersecurity warrants a "whole-of-society response." The Economist's report was seen by some as evidence that the worst fears about Mythos were true, a reaction that was undoubtedly fueled also by the aura of power and mystery that has coalesced around the model in recent months. That aura has arguably been a boon for Anthropic, which recently usurped OpenAI as the most valuable startup in the world and is preparing for what's expected to be a historic IPO. But it's also been a contributing factor in its latest skirmish with the Trump administration, which ordered the company earlier this month to restrict access for all foreign nationals to Fable 5, a "Mythos-class" model that had recently been made publicly available and which was built with safeguards that to some users were annoyingly stringent. Citing national security concerns, the administration invoked an obscure piece of export control legislation, a move that, according to some legal experts, is spurious. Many cybersecurity experts, meanwhile, argued that the ban would hamstring U.S. cybersecurity defenses and give adversaries like China the upper hand. That argument was seemingly vindicated by a Tuesday report from the New York Times which said that Trump's ban -- which also targeted another model called Mythos 5, which had only been made available to a small group of organizations -- had put the kibosh on the NSA's internal tests with Mythos, and that the administration was now working with Anthropic to reinstate the agency's access for limited purposes related to national security. The NSA did not immediately respond to Gizmodo's request for comment. That same report from the Times also clarified that the NSA's internal tests with Mythos were less apocalyptic than online rumors might suggest. According to federal officials cited in the report, the tests were carried out in a digital environment so robustly controlled that it's very unlikely any hacker or foreign intelligence agency could replicate them. The officials also told the Times that even though Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, it didn't actually exploit them. The author of the report in The Economist -- the one that had been the initial cause of all the worry -- has also admitted that his portrayal of the NSA's tests with Mythos had been misleading. The tests "surely [involved] using Mythos alongside other tools under very particular conditions," he wrote in a X post on Sunday. "I quoted [Senator Warner] to give a sense of Mythos' potency. But it was a mistake not to have added caveats."

Anthropic's Mythos found flaws in classified US systems during a government test

An official says the model surfaced vulnerabilities in highly sensitive networks within hours. It was a red-team exercise, not an outside breach. One of Anthropic's AI models identified vulnerabilities in highly sensitive, classified US government computer systems during a testing exercise, a US official has told the Associated Press. The model in question was Mythos, Anthropic's most capable system, and it surfaced the flaws within hours. Crucially, finding a weakness within hours is not the same as exploiting it within hours, and the official did not say the model did the latter. The framing matters because a more dramatic version has been travelling faster than the facts. The testing was a red-team exercise, an organisation probing its own defences, in which intelligence agencies ran Mythos against their own classified environments to see what it would find. It was not an intrusion from outside, and there is no claim that any real system was compromised. The AP's account attributes the finding to a single unnamed official. The exercise sits inside Project Glasswing, the controlled-access scheme through which Anthropic has given Mythos to a vetted set of organisations rather than releasing it publicly. The model was built to find, and in tests exploit, software vulnerabilities, and it has done so at a scale that unnerved the people who saw it. In earlier evaluations it turned up thousands of zero-day flaws across major operating systems and browsers, including a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD. The classified-systems claim entered public view through a Senate hearing. On June 11, Senator Mark Warner, vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said General Joshua Rudd, who leads the NSA and Cyber Command, had told him Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours." Whether or not the more colourful account holds, the underlying capability is not in dispute. The UK's AI Security Institute assessed Mythos as substantially more capable at cyber offence than any model it had previously tested. What is contested is how to read a red-team result against classified networks, an unsettling demonstration of speed, not evidence of a breach actually suffered. The episode lands inside a tangle the US government has not resolved. The NSA has been authorised to keep using Mythos on classified networks, and parts of the intelligence community and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have been testing it. At the same time, the administration forced Anthropic to disable Mythos and its public sibling Fable 5 worldwide on June 12, after a separate dispute over a reported jailbreak, an order now being challenged in court. The same government that depends on the model has also restricted it, opposed expanding it, and earlier branded its maker a national security supply-chain risk. That contradiction is the throughline of the past three months. Anthropic's Mythos has been moving between governments faster than any of them can decide what it is for: used by the NSA, courted by the Treasury, opposed by parts of the White House, and fought over by the Pentagon. Warner, for his part, cited the testing not to condemn Anthropic but to argue for mandatory pre-release evaluation of frontier models, which is a different point than the one that went viral. Anthropic has not disclosed what the test found, and the agencies involved have said little on the record. The company has finished training a successor to Mythos, a sign the capability is advancing regardless of how the politics settle. For now, the verifiable core is narrow and the inferences around it are wide: a powerful model, pointed at hard targets in a controlled setting, found weaknesses fast. What that means for everyone not running a red-team exercise is the part still being argued over.

Trump tells Axios he no longer views Anthropic as national security threat

June 19 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said he might have viewed artificial intelligence company Anthropic as a national security threat last week, but he no longer does, according to an interview with "The Axios Show" published on Friday. Senior Anthropic technical staff were scheduled to meet with Trump administration officials earlier this week to discuss a dispute over foreign access to its most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The company last ⁠week disabled access for all users to those models after Trump ordered Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing them. Here are some of the details from the Axios interview: Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto; Editing by Nia Williams Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Why Would Amazon's CEO Try to Kneecap Anthropic by Tattling to Trump?

For years now, Amazon has been in Anthropic's corner in the artificial intelligence war, putting $4 billion into the AI startup in 2023. Since then, it's poured in more and more cash at every turn, including another $25 billion just this past April to Anthropic's growing infrastructure needs. So you'd imagine, then, that Amazon would be thrilled that Anthropic is on its way to becoming a publicly traded company with a highly touted model that has lapped some rivals in benchmarking scores. It turns out, maybe not. Earlier this month, Anthropic's Fable 5 AI model -- the supposedly safe version of its "too powerful to release" Mythos model -- was essentially banned by the Trump administration after the government was alerted that the chatbot could be jailbroken and potentially used in cyberattacks. The party responsible for getting the Trump gang up in arms and ultimately getting Fable 5 locked down for anyone outside of the United States was... Amazon, allegedly. According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy took concerns raised by his security researchers to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other government officials, who hit the emergency shut-off button. Anthropic, for what it's worth, claimed that the technique Amazon was so worried about could only identify "a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities" that other frontier models could also find. It's also worth noting that it's possible to jailbreak basically any LLM, though the workarounds tend to be very specific and have limited utility. In comparison to Amazon's market cap, its investment in Anthropic is a drop in the bucket. But you wouldn't think the online retail giant, with billions tied up in Anthropic's success, would go out of its way to hinder it so severely at such a pivotal moment. We're starting to get a clearer picture of the "why" now. It seems that the frontier AI lab didn't view Amazon's investments as an offer to go steady. Instead, Anthropic pocketed Amazon's support and started shopping around the rest of the valley. Less than a month after taking Amazon's money earmarked for infrastructure needs, Anthropic reportedly committed to spending $200 billion on Google's cloud services and entered into a deal with SpaceX to rent out its Colossus data center. That surely did not thrill Amazon, as it was in the process of spinning up more AWS servers presumably meant to power Claude. But it's also a part of an apparent broader trend for Anthropic. According to a recent report from The Information, Anthropic has been making it something of a habit to partner with companies and then two-time them, which is not really a great way to make friends. Amazon doesn't really have a reason to see Anthropic as a rival, and it has a lot invested in its success at this point, so it doesn't make much sense for it to try to kneecap Anthropic for competitive purposes. But it certainly sees Google as a rival, especially as it relates to AI infrastructure. Both companies are in the process of building and deploying their own custom chips, in no small part to rid themselves (and others) of reliance on Nvidia, which currently dominates the space. That has led to Google making its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) more widely available, and it has already signed Anthropic to deploy them. Amazon is now looking for partners who might want to do similar types of deals with its own custom chips, and while it will be doing business with Anthropic on that front, it's perhaps not thrilled that its biggest pal in the space is already seeing someone else with whom it's currently engaged in a chip-measuring contest. Both companies are developing and deploying custom chips, in large part to reduce their own -- and the broader industry's -- dependence on Nvidia, which currently dominates the market. Google has begun making its Tensor Processing Units more widely available and has already signed Anthropic as a major customer. Amazon is now seeking partners for similar deals involving its own chips, including Anthropic. Still, it may not be thrilled that its closest AI partner is also working with a rival in an increasingly competitive chip race. To the extent that Amazon is competing directly with Anthropic, Mythos is moving onto territory Anthropic has increasingly claimed as its own. Anthropic has centered much of the marketing for its latest models on cybersecurity and their ability to identify vulnerabilities. Its broader pitch is that the models are simply so powerful -- and potentially so dangerous -- that they cannot be released without strict safeguards, lest they be used to wreak havoc across the internet. Well, wouldn't you know it, Amazon's foray into the AI agent space is all about spotting and patching vulnerabilities. Now, does Amazon really think it can get its foot in the door by blocking Anthropic for a little while? Probably not. But it may also be firing a warning shot at its partner -- a reminder not to forget who's paying for dinner.

Trump says he no longer views Anthropic as a national security threat after G7 meeting with CEO

Trump told Axios that Anthropic has "behaved very responsibly" and signalled he may ease restrictions on its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models. President Donald Trump said in a pretaped Axios interview that he no longer views Anthropic as a national security threat, marking a sharp reversal from the administration's aggressive posture toward the AI company over the past three months. Asked whether he considers Anthropic a threat, Trump replied, "Well, not now. But a week ago, maybe." He added that the company has "behaved very responsibly." The comments come just days after the Commerce Department issued a directive on June 12 ordering Anthropic to seek US government approval before foreign nationals access its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, the company's most powerful AI systems. That order followed months of escalating tension between the administration and Anthropic over the company's refusal to remove certain safety guardrails from its military-facing products. The directive effectively triggered crisis-level talks between Anthropic and Commerce Department officials last week. Trump met Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Wednesday at the G7 Summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, an encounter that appears to have shifted the president's stance. The meeting came after Anthropic senior technical staff held separate discussions with Trump administration officials earlier in the week. Trump told Axios he would consider easing the restrictions, saying, "I would, but I'm not sure I have to do that," when asked about a potential rollback. The dispute traces back to March 2026, when the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after the company refused to strip guardrails related to surveillance and autonomous weapons from products used by the US military. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick subsequently sent a letter threatening criminal charges against the company, a move that drew criticism from technology industry groups and prompted allied governments, including the UK, to lobby for exemptions. The timing of Trump's conciliatory tone is significant. Anthropic confidentially filed for an initial public offering in early June, with a valuation that Fortune reported at approximately $965 billion. The ongoing federal restrictions had cast uncertainty over the listing, and any signal of de-escalation from the White House could stabilise investor confidence ahead of the offering. Trump described the situation as creating "tremendous liability" for the administration, an acknowledgment that the crackdown had drawn backlash from both industry and allies. The president also said he would not shut down Anthropic, though he stopped short of committing to a specific timeline for lifting the Commerce Department directive. The shift does not erase the underlying disagreement. The Pentagon's supply-chain designation remains in place, and the Commerce Department's June 12 order has not been formally rescinded. Anthropic has not publicly indicated whether it plans to modify its guardrail policies to satisfy the military's demands. What has changed is the political signal from the top: Trump appears willing to negotiate rather than escalate. Amodei has been working multiple channels to resolve the standoff. At the G7 summit, he and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis jointly pitched a US-led AI coalition to G7 leaders, positioning Anthropic as a cooperative partner in American technology diplomacy rather than a regulatory adversary. The strategy appears to have given Amodei direct access to Trump at a moment when the president was receptive. Whether the warm words translate into policy remains an open question. The Commerce Department operates with considerable independence on export control matters, and rolling back a formal directive requires bureaucratic steps that a single interview cannot shortcut. For Anthropic, the Axios interview is a political win, but the legal and regulatory constraints remain until the administration acts on them.

Vulnerabilities uncovered in secret US government systems and software during testing of Anthropic Mythos

The US Government confirmed what the community already knows * Senator Mark Warner testified NSA confirmed Mythos Preview identified vulnerabilities in nearly all classified systems within hours during a controlled exercise * US officials clarified Mythos found flaws rapidly rather than exploiting them, but the capability still raises major concern * Anthropic withheld public release, sharing only with select firms; Mozilla and others validated its potency, with thousands of critical bugs uncovered in weeks We now have another witness claiming Mythos Preview is able to break into protected systems fast and this one is none other than a high-ranking member of the US Government. According to the Associated Press, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia testified in front of a congressional hearing this month, saying he was informed by National Security Agency (NSA) chief Joshua Rudd that Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours." It's worth mentioning here that the break-in was controlled, since it was part of an exercise done by the Anthropic team and the intelligence agency. How powerful is Mythos? The Associated Press dug deeper, and was informed by an unidentified US official that Mythos merely found vulnerabilities within hours, not necessarily exploited them. Still, identifying a vulnerability that theoretically can be exploited for attacks against protected US Government systems should be cause for concern on its own. Mythos is an advanced AI model built by Anthropic, first introduced in early April this year. However, the company decided not to share it with the general public because it was apparently too capable of discovering and leveraging software vulnerabilities. Instead, Anthropic shared it with a handful of major corporations, to help them secure their systems before cybercriminals can use the tool. Since then, multiple companies came forward to confirm Mythos' potency, including Mozilla, which said the tool was "every bit as capable" as the world's best security researchers. Mozilla said that with the help of Mythos, it was able to ship more than 400 Firefox security bugs in April alone. A month later, Anthropic said the 50 companies using the tool discovered more than 10,000 critical and high-level security vulnerabilities in roughly two months' time. "Several have told us that their rate of bug-finding has increased by more than a factor of ten," the company said. "For instance, Cloudflare has found 2,000 bugs (400 of which are high- or critical-severity) across their critical-path systems, with a false positive rate that Cloudflare's team considers better than human testers." Via Reuters Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

White House quiet on OpenAI's Mythos-like model

Why it matters: The seemingly straightforward model release raises questions about what actually triggered the Trump administration's concerns about Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Catch up quick: OpenAI debuted an update to GPT-5.5-Cyber on Monday as part of a slew of announcements aimed at deepening its work with cybersecurity companies and researchers. Yes, but: The new GPT-5.5-Cyber achieved an 85.6% score in CyberGym, an internal benchmark that measures whether an AI agent can reproduce known software vulnerabilities. * In comparison, Mythos 5 scored 83.8% on the same evaluation. Between the lines: It's unclear why OpenAI was able to move forward with this model release while Anthropic is stuck fighting export controls that bar it from allowing foreign nationals to use its models. * The White House and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment. The intrigue: OpenAI also said it has expanded its partnerships with organizations in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, South Korea and the EU. * Meanwhile, negotiating access to Mythos was a major talking point at last week's G7 Summit. What to watch: Reports suggest that personality clashes between Anthropic and the Trump administration also prompted the export directive.

US saw risk of Anthropic models being diverted to foreign military intelligence

WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) - U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said he took action against Anthropic's latest Mythos and Fable AI models because officials feared they could be deployed by military intelligence users in China, Russia or other countries of concern. Lutnick noted the risk in a letter sent to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Friday, ordering the company to suspend export of the AI models to destinations worldwide and all foreign nationals, wherever located, according to a copy of the letter seen by Reuters on Monday. Senior Anthropic technical staff met with officials at the Department of Commerce in Washington on Monday to negotiate a solution, a Trump administration official said. The stakes are high, with the government seeking assurances the models cannot be used to harm the U.S., while Anthropic is pushing to restore access to its top-tier models after ⁠taking them offline for all users on Friday. Lutnick has been part of the process, holding regular calls with Anthropic officials as he works toward a deal, a source familiar with the situation said. Amodei and Lutnick are both set to attend the G7 meetings in Evian-les-Bains, France, where they may speak as negotiations continue. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross joined Monday's working-level meeting with Anthropic at the Commerce Department, the source added. The company's technical staff have met with officials virtually every day since the Trump administration contacted the company on Friday, a person close to the company told Reuters. After the Lutnick letter, Anthropic said it would disable access to the models globally. The government told the company it believes there is a method of bypassing, or "jailbreaking," a safeguard that would prevent Fable 5 from being used in identifying software vulnerabilities, Anthropic said in a blog post on Friday. The bypass found only "minor" security flaws that other publicly available models can also find, the company added. Relations between the Trump administration and Anthropic ruptured earlier this year after Anthropic refused to allow the U.S. military to use its AI models for domestic surveillance and fully ⁠autonomous weapons systems, and the government retaliated by putting it on a national security blacklist. The San Francisco-based AI startup, which has confidentially filed for a U.S. initial public offering, had previously warned about the hacking capabilities of its Mythos model and held it back from wide release. On June 9, Anthropic rolled out a public version, called Fable 5, which included what it described as cybersecurity safeguards. Anthropic worked with the government to test Fable 5 before it was released, the person close to the company said, and received its approval to deploy it. POWERS USED FOR THE FIRST TIME TO STOP ANTHROPIC The letter to ⁠Anthropic said the Commerce Department was taking action through authorities granted it under the 2018 Export Control Reform Act to impose controls on emerging technologies essential to U.S. national security. It marks the first time the Commerce Department has used that power, according to an export control expert. The letter said that the Commerce Department would require a license for the export (or transfer to a foreign national in the U.S.), ⁠and threatened that failure to comply with the new restriction would result in "prompt criminal and civil penalties." However, export control experts said that AI models are generally not exported. They are deployed through remote access, which the export control regulations do not control, raising questions over whether Commerce has the legal authority to take such action. The Commerce Department did not respond to ⁠questions about the authorities in question. Neither the department nor Anthropic responded to requests for comment on the Monday meeting. More than 80 cybersecurity executives and experts on Sunday signed an open letter to Lutnick and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross that supported Anthropic's position. In that letter, cybersecurity leaders at major firms, including Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab and Adobe (ADBE.O), opens new tab, asked the Trump administration to lift the restrictions on Anthropic. Reporting by Karen Freifeld in New York; Additional reporting by AJ Vicens in Detroit; Editing by Chris Sanders, Matthew Lewis and Shri Navaratnam Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Cyber AI Beats Anthropic's Banned Mythos Model -- And Nobody's Shutting It Down

The model is being released to trusted defenders with controls, in contrast to Anthropic's more restricted approach. OpenAI's cybersecurity model just beat the Anthropic Mythos AI model that the U.S. government yanked offline -- and it's still up and running. On June 22, OpenAI announced the full launch of GPT-5.5-Cyber as part of its Daybreak cyber defense program. On CyberGym -- a benchmark developed at UC Berkeley that presents AI agents with 1,507 known software vulnerabilities from 188 open-source projects and scores them on how many they can reproduce in a controlled environment -- the updated model reached 85.6%. Anthropic's Mythos 5 sits at 83.8% on the same leaderboard. Claude Opus 4.7, Anthropic's more broadly available model, scored 73.1%. A less-than-two-point gap on any benchmark would normally be unremarkable. The context here is not. Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Fable 5 were pulled offline on June 12 after the Donald Trump administration issued an emergency export control directive citing national security. The government pointed to a jailbreak -- a technique for bypassing an AI model's built-in safety limits, similar to finding a master key that unlocks a high-security door. Anthropic had no reliable way to verify user nationality at scale, so it disabled both models for everyone, everywhere. Some of the damage was self-inflicted. Anthropic spent months describing Mythos as one of the most capable -- and most dangerous -- AI models ever built, warning in its own launch documentation that its cybersecurity abilities could cause serious harm without the right restrictions. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on June 10 comparing frontier AI models to aircraft that safety regulators should be able to ground if they fail audits. A few days later, the government grounded Anthropic's aircraft. It wasn't the only alarm that week. Anthropic had already come under fire over a hidden filter in Fable 5 that silently degraded the model's outputs for users it suspected of building competing AI -- without telling them -- and was forced to apologize and reverse the policy. A different playbook While Anthropic negotiates with the Commerce Department and continues its lawsuit against the Trump administration, OpenAI is extending its reach. Daybreak has signed cybersecurity partnerships with Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and EU institutions including the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity. Twenty-eight security firms -- including CrowdStrike, Cisco, and Cloudflare -- have joined its Cyber Partner Program to embed GPT-5.5 into their products for vetted customers. Per OpenAI's own blog, Codex Security tool has scanned over 30 million commits across 30,000 codebases and logged more than 500,000 fixed vulnerabilities since launching in March. The company is also expanding a partner program so security firms can integrate these capabilities into their own tools, and it launched "Patch the Planet," an initiative to help fix vulnerabilities in widely used open-source projects. That said, GPT-5.5-Cyber is not for general use. It's available only to verified security professionals, and OpenAI ran pre-deployment tests with federal agencies -- including the Center for AI Standards and Innovation and the Office of the National Cyber Director -- before launch. That's the same restricted-access approach Anthropic attempted with Mythos, but OpenAI cleared its approach with the government first. As of June 23, Fable 5 and Mythos 5 remain offline -- eleven days into a suspension with no official restoration date from Anthropic or the Commerce Department.

Anthropic AI broke into classified US systems in hours, officials say

Mere hours, not weeks -- that is how long it took an Anthropic AI model to find vulnerabilities across classified US government systems. An AI model developed by Anthropic has identified vulnerabilities in highly sensitive US government computer systems during a testing exercise, a US official told the Associated Press. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Anthropic had teamed up with US intelligence agencies to conduct the tests using the company's Mythos model. It identified certain vulnerabilities within hours, though that did not mean the model was able to exploit them within that time, the official said. The testing was carried out through an Anthropic initiative called Project Glasswing, which brought together technology companies in a bid to secure critical software from the "severe" fallout that Mythos could pose to public safety, national security and the economy. Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia had briefly mentioned the testing during a 11 June hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. "This tool broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks but in hours," he said, attributing the information to the head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and US Cyber Command, General Joshua Rudd. Growing tensions Despite the cooperation between Anthropic and US agencies, tensions between the California-based company and the Trump administration have been growing. Anthropic has raised concerns over how the US military would use its AI, while the administration has moved to restrict the use of some of its models. Earlier this month, the administration issued a directive requiring Anthropic to prevent foreign nationals from using its latest models, known as Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Anthropic released Fable widely this month -- a limited version of the more advanced Mythos, to which the company has tightly restricted access due to cybersecurity concerns. The directive came 10 days after President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a framework for the federal government to vet national security risks posed by the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release. Participation by AI developers would be voluntary, the order said. Anthropic said it disabled the models for all customers to comply with the directive, but added it did not believe the government's steps were warranted by the security concern it had flagged. Industry pushback More than 100 cybersecurity experts and leaders from companies including Adobe and Nvidia have written to the government urging it to lift the directive, warning the move could benefit US adversaries more than it harms them. In their letter, the signatories said Anthropic's Mythos models are "quite good" at finding software flaws and weaponising exploits -- but "not uniquely good at these tasks." Many said they regularly use other foundation and open-source models for security audits and training, and warned it was dangerous to remove the best cyber defence capabilities "without a good reason" at a time when America's adversaries are rapidly advancing.

Exclusive: Trump tells "The Axios Show" that Anthropic was a national security threat

* Between the Commerce Department's imposition of sweeping export controls and the Pentagon's designating it a supply chain risk, the company has faced treatment typically reserved for foreign adversaries. What they're saying: Axios' Marc Caputo asked Trump in a wide-ranging White House interview if he viewed Anthropic, or CEO Dario Amodei, as a threat to national security. * "Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe," the president said. * But he said he walked away from the G7 summit with the impression that Amodei was "nice" and "smart." * "He responded to us very quickly because you know it's a tremendous liability," Trump said. "People get put in prison immediately for that. You can't play games with that. And he responded very responsibly, I thought." Catch up quick: Last week the Trump administration restricted any country outside of the U.S., and foreign nationals within the U.S., from accessing Anthropic's most advanced models. * A report from Amazon detailing a vulnerability alarmed the administration, which took it to Anthropic leadership but felt dismissed. * Technical discussions in Washington ensued. The two sides are now reportedly working on standards to evaluate AI jailbreaks. * For Anthropic, it's been a matter of learning how to communicate with the administration as much as reaching an understanding on how the technology works. Yes, but: Trump did not rule out leveraging emergency powers under the Defense Production Act if the AI lab did not get in line, as was previously threatened during a dispute with the Pentagon. * "I have the power to use a lot of things," Trump said of the DPA. "But I'm not sure I have to do that." * "It was a competitor and a part owner that turned Anthropic in. They didn't like what they were doing. They were very concerned," Trump said of the concerns raised by Amazon. "I think so far it's been very responsible." For the record: "We are grateful to the administration for their ongoing partnership in working to get this matter resolved as quickly as possible," Anthropic said in a statement. * "We remain committed to working alongside them towards our shared goals of protecting critical infrastructure and making sure the U.S. leads in AI." Between the lines: The race to beat China on AI still outweighs the political clashes with Anthropic or its peers, in Trump's view. * Trump said he does not want to shut down Anthropic because the U.S. is beating China "by a lot." * "I was with President Xi. We talked about it. We're beating China by a lot," Trump said. "The good far outweighs the bad. We are going to find the bad and we're going to stop it." The bottom line: The relationship between the White House and Anthropic appears to be on the mend.

Cyber leaders urge US to lift curbs on Anthropic's security models

0 seconds of 0 secondsVolume 0% Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts Keyboard ShortcutsEnabledDisabled Shortcuts Open/Close/ or ? Play/PauseSPACE Increase Volume↑ Decrease Volume↓ Seek Forward→ Seek Backward← Captions On/Offc Fullscreen/Exit Fullscreenf Mute/Unmutem Decrease Caption Size- Increase Caption Size+ or = Seek %0-9 Next Up US Senate votes to halt Iran war in latest rebuke of Trump 00:00 00:00 00:00 June 15 (Reuters) - Cybersecurity leaders at major U.S. firms, including Nvidia and Adobe, have asked the Trump administration to lift restrictions on Anthropic's most powerful AI models, arguing that the bans hamper efforts to prevent the spread of digital attacks. The letter follows Washington's decision on Friday ordering Anthropic to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for any foreign nationals over national security concerns. After previously warning about the hacking capabilities of its Mythos model and withholding it from wide release to prevent potential harm, Anthropic last week released a public version called Fable with what it described as cybersecurity safeguards. The curbs that Washington has now placed on the technology will limit the cybersecurity industry's ability to find and fix software flaws at a time when other AI tools are making ⁠it easier for hackers to exploit vulnerabilities, according to a letter on Sunday signed by more than 50 security leaders. The letter said Anthropic's models were not uniquely capable of finding security flaws and weaponizing exploits, with rival models, including China's Kimi 2.7, offering similar abilities. "Mythos is almost definitely the best model right now for finding security bugs and codes, but it is like an incremental advance over other models that are already open," Joshua Saxe, CTO of AI security firm Abundant Security and a signatory of the letter, said in an interview. ANTHROPIC'S NATIONAL SECURITY TIGHTROPE Senior Anthropic staff are scheduled to meet with government officials at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington on Monday, an official in the Trump administration told Reuters. Anthropic has said the government believes there is a way to bypass, or "jailbreak," a safeguard ⁠that prevents Fable from being used to identify software vulnerabilities. It has argued that a narrow potential jailbreak should not be grounds for cutting off access to a model used by hundreds of millions of people. The letter echoed the point, saying Anthropic has already built robust protections and that pulling the capabilities could prove "dangerous" as China's open-source models are just months behind the best American ones, with Beijing likely having access to capabilities beyond what is ⁠publicly known. Any regulation needs to be evidence-based, clearly defined and applied consistently and "none of those standards was followed here," said Alex Stamos, another signatory who serves as chief product officer at Corridor. "This is an overreaction by the government," he said, adding that there was a dispute between Anthropic and the third ⁠party that flagged the issue over how serious the findings were, based on his conversations with those involved. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike (CRWD.O), opens new tab last week said China-linked hackers posed the biggest espionage threat to technology companies over the past year. The $965 billion AI company, which is preparing to go public, has ⁠previously tussled with the U.S.government on access to its models and their impact on national security. The Trump administration earlier this year directed U.S. agencies to stop working with Anthropic and declared it a supply risk due to its reluctance to let its technology be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Reporting by Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur and Anil D'Silva Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Anthropic's Mythos model found vulnerabilities in classified US government systems, official says

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A U.S. official told The Associated Press on Tuesday that one of Anthropic's artificial intelligence models had identified vulnerabilities in highly sensitive and secure U.S. government computer systems during a testing exercise. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter, said Anthropic had teamed up with U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct tests using the company's Mythos model. It had identified certain vulnerabilities within hours, but that does not mean the model was able to exploit them within that time, the official said. The official said the testing was done through an Anthropic initiative called Project Glasswing, which brought together tech giants and other companies in hopes of securing the world's critical software from "severe" fallout that the Mythos model could pose to public safety, national security and the economy. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia had briefly mentioned the testing during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Warner had said, "This tool broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks but in hours." He attributed the information to the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, who is Gen. Joshua Rudd. The NSA declined to comment on the matter in an email. An Anthropic spokesman also declined to comment. Despite the recent cooperation between Anthropic and U.S. agencies to test for vulnerabilities, tensions between the California company and the Trump administration have been growing. Anthropic has raised concerns over how the U.S. military would use its AI, while the administration has restricted the use of some of Anthropic's models. The administration issued a directive earlier this month requiring Anthropic to prevent foreign nationals from using its latest artificial intelligence models, known as Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Anthropic released Fable widely earlier this month. That model is a limited version of the more advanced Mythos, to which the company has tightly limited access due to cybersecurity fears. The directive came 10 days after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to establish a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release. Participation by AI developers would be voluntary, the order said. Anthropic said it disabled the models for all of its customers to comply with the administration's directive. The AI giant said it did not believe the steps taken by the government were warranted by the concern it flagged about a potential security issue. A group of cybersecurity executives has also asked the Trump administration to lift its directive, saying the move could help U.S. adversaries more than it hurts them. More than 100 cybersecurity experts and leaders from companies including Adobe and Nvidia told the government in a letter that Anthropic's Mythos models are "quite good" at finding flaws in software and weaponizing exploits -- but they are "not uniquely good at these tasks." Many of the letter's signatories said they regularly use other foundation and open-source models for security audits and training. The letter said it is dangerous to take away the best cyber defense capabilities "without a good reason" when America's adversaries are rapidly advancing.

Trump Tells Axios He No Longer Views Anthropic as National Security Threat

June 19 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump ⁠said ⁠he might have viewed ⁠artificial intelligence company Anthropic as a national security threat last week, but he no longer does, according to an interview with "The Axios Show" published on Friday. Senior Anthropic technical staff were scheduled to meet with Trump ⁠administration officials ⁠earlier this week to discuss a dispute over foreign access to its most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The company last week disabled access for all users to those models after Trump ordered Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing them. Here ⁠are some ⁠of the details from ⁠the Axios interview: * When asked if he viewed Anthropic, or its CEO Dario Amodei, as a ⁠threat to national security, Trump said: "Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe." * Trump told Axios that Amodei responded to the administration's export control directive "very quickly" and "responsibly." * Trump and other G7 leaders met ⁠with tech bosses, including Amodei, at a summit in France this ⁠week. * Trump did not rule out using emergency powers under the Defense Production Act against Anthropic, according to Axios. * "I have the power to use a lot of things," Trump said of the DPA. "But I'm not sure I have to do that." * Asked to comment on Trump's interview, an Anthropic spokesperson said: "We are grateful to the administration for their ongoing partnership ⁠in working to get this matter resolved as quickly as possible. We remain committed to working alongside them towards our shared goals of protecting critical infrastructure and making sure the U.S. leads in AI." (Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto; Editing by Nia Williams)

Anthropic staff to meet White House officials next week, Axios reports

June 14 (Reuters) - Senior Anthropic technical staff are in Washington to meet with White House officials to try resolving a dispute that has taken the company's most advanced AI models offline, Axios reported on Sunday, citing a source close to the company. Reuters could not immediately verify the ⁠report. Anthropic and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Anthropic's technical staff have held virtual meetings with White House officials since the Trump administration's initial outreach on Friday, the report said. The Trump administration ordered Anthropic to block any foreign nationals, whether inside or outside ⁠the U.S., from using its latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the company said. In response, Anthropic said it would disable access to the models globally. The ⁠San Francisco-based AI startup, which has confidentially filed for a U.S. initial public offering, had previously warned about the hacking ⁠capabilities of its Mythos model and held it back from wide release. Earlier this week, Anthropic ⁠rolled out a public version, called Fable, that included what it described as cybersecurity safeguards. Reporting by Gnaneshwar Rajan in Bengaluru; Editing by Edmund Klamann Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

David Sacks Says Anthropic Lost White House Trust Over Alleged AI Jailbreak Vulnerabilities, Cyber Weapon

Former White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks said the White House grew concerned that Anthropic's AI systems could pose cyber weapon risks after reported jailbreak issues and escalating disputes over the rollout of its "Fable" model. White House Alarm Over AI Jailbreak Claims On Saturday, speaking on the "All-In Podcast," Sacks said he received readouts from White House officials and private companies suggesting rising national security concerns that Anthropic's models could function as a "cyber weapon." "What this comes down to is a couple of things," Sacks said, describing internal government concern that the company's models had advanced cyber capabilities. He said officials were especially concerned after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei reportedly described an earlier system as having powerful offensive cyber potential. Sacks said this framing contributed to officials viewing the technology as potentially dual-use. According to Sacks, tensions escalated when testing partners allegedly identified jailbreak vulnerabilities in "Fable," a later model with safety guardrails. "It wasn't the White House who came to the conclusion... it was private companies who were testing Fable," he said, adding that concerns were then escalated to federal officials. Sacks also claimed there were attempts by the White House to contact Anthropic to address the issue, saying discussions became strained over how serious the vulnerability was. "They tried to call Anthropic... and the TL;DR is Dario refused," he said, characterizing the breakdown as a trust issue. Anthropic has not publicly confirmed those claims. US Split Over AI Policy And Anthropic Ban Earlier, Sriram Krishnan stepped down as White House senior AI policy advisor at the end of June after helping shape the administration's AI strategy focused on expanding data center infrastructure. He credited President Donald Trump's leadership and Sacks and planned to remain involved in AI policy through an outside institution. Meanwhile, the U.S. government was divided over Anthropic's AI systems. The Pentagon blacklisted the company from military use over national security concerns, labeling it a "supply chain risk," while Trump signaled openness to a potential deal. To address broader concerns, White House officials drafted a national security AI policy requiring agencies to use multiple AI providers and limiting contractor influence over military command structures. The administration also considered ways to bypass Anthropic's restrictions to allow potential use of its AI model, Mythos. Photo courtesy: Shutterstock Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

White House Says Anthropic No Longer Security Threat | PYMNTS.com

The White House earlier this month ordered the artificial intelligence startup to get government approval before permitting foreign individuals, companies or nations from accessing its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. But in an interview with Axios published Friday (June 19), Trump said he thought Anthropic had "behaved very responsibly" in response to the administration's order. "He responded to us very quickly, because you know it's tremendous liability," Trump said of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Asked if he believed Anthropic and Amodei are a national security threat, Trump said, "Well, not now. But a week ago, maybe." The president said he wouldn't shut down Anthropic, arguing that the U.S. is beating China in the AI race. "I would, but I'm not sure I have to do that. I think so far it's been very responsible," he said in the interview. He was also asked if he would consider using the Defense Production Act to regulate or control the AI industry. "I would, but I'm not sure I have to do that," Trump added. "I think so far it's been very responsible. Actually, it was a competitor and a part owner that turned Anthropic in. They didn't like what they were doing. They were very concerned. Think of it, it's part owner, and I think it worked out very well, I think." The ban on the Mythos and Fable models follows a dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon that began when the company sought to halt the use of its technology for mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. When contract talks collapsed, the Defense Department declared Anthropic a supply chain risk. Anthropic is suing to overturn that designation. In other Anthropic news, PYMNTS wrote last week about the company's decision to hold off on a planned move to token- and credit-based billing for its Claude Agent SDK following protests from developers and customers worried about unpredictable costs. "For enterprise AI buyers, Anthropic's decision is more than a pricing adjustment," that report said. "It highlights a broader uncertainty surrounding agentic AI deployment. While businesses increasingly want AI agents to handle research, customer service, software development and workflow automation, procurement and finance teams remain focused on a more practical question: What will operating these systems actually cost?" For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.

Trump Says Anthropic Was National Security Threat 'A Week Ago, Maybe' -- Then Credits Claude Maker For Act

Trump Softens Stance On Anthropic After AI Access Dispute In an interview with The Axios Show published Friday, Trump was asked whether he viewed Anthropic or its CEO, Dario Amodei, as a threat to national security. "Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe," Trump said. The comments follow a dispute between the Trump administration and Anthropic over foreign access to the company's flagship AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Senior Anthropic technical staff were scheduled to meet with administration officials this week to discuss the issue. According to Trump, Anthropic responded "very quickly" and "responsibly" after receiving the administration's directive. AI Export Controls And National Security Concerns Last week, Anthropic disabled access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after the U.S. government ordered the company to prevent foreign nationals from using the systems, citing national security authorities. The move underscores growing concerns in Washington over the potential misuse of advanced AI technologies and the risks associated with foreign access to cutting-edge U.S.-developed models. Trump also declined to rule out using powers under the Defense Production Act, a law that grants the president broad authority in matters tied to national security. "I have the power to use a lot of things," Trump said. "But I'm not sure I have to do that." Anthropic Signals Cooperation As IPO Option Remains Open Responding to Trump's remarks, an Anthropic spokesperson said the company appreciated its ongoing engagement with the administration. "We are grateful to the administration for their ongoing partnership in working to get this matter resolved as quickly as possible," the spokesperson said. The developments come shortly after Anthropic confidentially filed a draft Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, preserving the option to pursue an initial public offering once the regulatory review process is completed. Price Action: Shares of AMZN rose 2.9% to close at $244.39 on Thursday and declined 0.51% to $243.15 in after-hours trading, according to Benzinga Pro. Per Benzinga Edge Stock Rankings, Amazon's Growth score is in the 95th percentile, driven by strong medium and long-term price performance, despite a weaker short-term trend. Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Photo courtesy: Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Anthropic's 'Mythos' sniffed out vulnerabilities in classified US government systems within hours: report

Anthropic's powerful "Mythos" AI model was reportedly able to find vulnerabilities in highly secure US government systems within just a few hours -- the latest development to stoke security concerns about the product. During tests conducted by US intelligence agencies, Mythos identified certain vulnerabilities in government systems within hours - though that does not mean the bot would be able to exploit those same sensitivities within that timeframe, the Associated Press reported this week. Those tests were part of an Anthropic initiative known as Project Glasswing, which partnered with other companies and agencies to resolve potential security concerns - following reports Anthropic's Mythos and "Fable" were so advanced that they could spark an AI doomsday. The dire warnings about the software have prompted skepticism from some observers, who say they're basically marketing for Anthropic in the highly competitive AI race. But after a congressional hearing earlier this month, Sen. Mark Warner, the top Dem on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Gen. Joshua Rudd, chief of the National Security Agency, told lawmakers that Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours." A White House official told The Post that various parts of the US government have been using cutting-edge AI models to identify and mitigate cyber vulnerabilities, and that President Trump has taken action to protect classified systems. The National Security Agency and Anthropic did not immediately respond to The Post's requests for comment. Earlier this month, the Trump administration slapped foreign export controls on "Mythos" and "Fable," after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warned the administration that researchers had found evidence it was possible to bypass their safety guardrails. Anthropic responded by pulling the models offline entirely, claiming that was the only way to comply with the new restrictions - as it sent several top officials to Washington, DC, in an attempt to win over government officials. The National Security Agency had been testing versions of Anthropic's latest AI tools when the latest models were shut down, according to the New York Times, in a sign of how important the bots have already become for cybersecurity and national security measures. Meanwhile, tensions between Anthropic and the US government have been heating up ever since Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to give the Pentagon unchecked access to AI tools during contract negotiations, seeking limits for their use in mass surveillance or weaponry. After the government slapped Anthropic's latest models with export restrictions, the company argued the steps were unnecessary, saying it had simply flagged potential security risks in the bots. But as The Post previously reported, White House officials were irked that Anthropic had downplayed the safety risks as a "narrow" problem - after years of warning about the potential catastrophic consequences of unruly AI bots. Now Anthropic is scrambling to cozy up to the government and resolve security concerns, most recently pledging to work more closely with the White House in a proposal to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, as The Post exclusively reported. Talks between Anthropic and Trump officials are progressing well, though a timeline for a permanent fix remains unclear, a source said. At the G7 Summit in France last week, Trump said talks with Anthropic were "going fine," while Amodei urged world leaders to "resist the temptation to splinter" in their approaches to AI regulation.

Anthropic's Mythos Finds Flaws in Classified US Systems within Hours

Anthropic's Mythos artificial intelligence model found vulnerabilities in classified US government systems within hours during a security test, according to a US official. The disclosure has raised questions about government networks, open-source software and crypto systems as AI tools gain stronger cyber capabilities. The official stressed that finding a weakness did not mean Mythos exploited it in the same period. That distinction casts doubt on claims that the model 'broke into' classified systems within hours. The tests formed part of , a program involving Anthropic and US intelligence agencies.

Anthropic AI model finds flaws in US government systems- AP By Investing.com

Investing.com -- An Anthropic artificial intelligence model identified vulnerabilities in classified U.S. government computer systems during a testing exercise, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday, citing a U.S. official. Anthropic worked with U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct tests using the company's Mythos model. The model found certain vulnerabilities within hours, though it did not exploit them in that timeframe, the AP reported. The testing occurred through Project Glasswing, an Anthropic initiative that works with technology companies and the government to protect critical software from severe risks that the Mythos model could present to public safety, national security and the economy. Relations between the California-based company and the Trump administration have become strained. Anthropic raised concerns about military use of its AI technology, while the administration limited use of some Anthropic models. Earlier this month, the administration issued a directive requiring Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing its newest artificial intelligence models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

Trump tells Axios he no longer views Anthropic as national security threat

June 19 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said he might have viewed artificial intelligence company Anthropic as a national security threat last week, but he no longer does, according to an interview with "The Axios Show" published on Friday. Senior Anthropic technical staff were scheduled to meet with Trump administration officials earlier this week to discuss a dispute over foreign access to its most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The company last week disabled access for all users to those models after Trump ordered Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing them. Here are some of the details from the Axios interview: o When asked if he viewed Anthropic, or its CEO Dario Amodei, as a threat to national security, Trump said: "Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe." o Trump told Axios that Amodei responded to the administration's export control directive "very quickly" and "responsibly." o Trump and other G7 leaders met with tech bosses, including Amodei, at a summit in France this week. o Trump did not rule out using emergency powers under the Defense Production Act against Anthropic, according to Axios. o "I have the power to use a lot of things," Trump said of the DPA. "But I'm not sure I have to do that." o Asked to comment on Trump's interview, an Anthropic spokesperson said: "We are grateful to the administration for their ongoing partnership in working to get this matter resolved as quickly as possible. We remain committed to working alongside them towards our shared goals of protecting critical infrastructure and making sure the U.S. leads in AI." (Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto; Editing by Nia Williams)