Anthropic Engineers Head to DC After White House Orders AI Model Pull

Senior technical staff from Anthropic are meeting with White House officials this week after the Trump administration ordered the company to restrict access to its latest AI models over national security fears. A source close to the company confirmed that top engineers are in Washington, holding daily virtual sessions with administration representatives since the initial outreach.

The controversy centers on two new models - Fable and Mythos - which Anthropic pulled last Friday after an export control directive required blocking foreign nationals from using them. The order cited concerns about a method to bypass safety guardrails, or "jailbreak," the Fable model. Anthropic had released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 the previous Tuesday. Fable 5, a so-called "Mythos-class" model, went public with safeguards limiting dangerous capabilities. Mythos 5, which lacks some of those restrictions, was shared only with a small group of cyberdefenders and infrastructure providers.

Following the broader rollout, Anthropic said the U.S. government provided "verbal evidence" of a "potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak" - essentially tricking the model into reading a specific codebase and fixing software flaws. The company pushed back on the recall, arguing that perfect jailbreak resistance isn't feasible and that applying such a standard across the industry would halt all new model deployments. "This action does not adhere to principles of transparency, fairness, and technical accuracy," Anthropic stated, while reiterating support for statutory processes that allow the government to block unsafe deployments.

Source: The Hill