Commerce Department Threatened Anthropic With Criminal Charges Over AI Models

In the letter that led Anthropic to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 artificial intelligence models on Friday (June 12), Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordered the company not to give foreign nationals anywhere in the world access to the models without a license from the Commerce Department, Bloomberg reported Tuesday (June 16).

Lutnick also said in the letter that if Anthropic failed to comply with this demand, the company would face criminal and civil penalties, according to the report.

He cited federal laws that allow the imposition of export controls on civilian technology that could be used for intelligence purposes by an adversary’s military, per the report.

Anthropic had launched the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models three days earlier, on June 9, saying it had developed safeguards to prevent them from being misused.

The company said in a Friday announcement that it disabled some access to the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models in response to a U.S. government export control directive that cited unspecified “national security authorities” and called on the company to suspend access to those models by “any foreign national,” whether within or outside the U.S.

“Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5,” Anthropic said.

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The company said that although it is complying with the government directive, it disagrees with the contention that a “narrow potential jailbreak” justified recalling a model that it had deployed to hundreds of millions of users.

“If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers,” Anthropic said in its announcement.

It was reported Monday (June 15) that Anthropic is working with the White House to resolve the ban on the products. The AI startup sent top members of its tech team to Washington over the weekend in hopes of making a deal to end restrictions on the two AI models.

According to Tuesday’s report by Bloomberg, since Friday, Anthropic representatives and U.S. officials have met both online and at Commerce to discuss specific security issues.

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