By TRH Foreign Affairs Desk
The US export curbs on Anthropic AI tools seem a replay of China playbook in exploiting leverage for geopolitical hegemony.
New Delhi, June 13, 2026 — The US has restricted high-end AI tools — Fable 5 and Mythos 6 — of Anthropic. The restriction applies within the US for foreign nationals, as well as export bar. Making the case more alarming, these AI tools cannot be used even by Anthropic employees outside the US.
The US curbs on Anthropic come close on the heels of pentagon barring the Dario Amodei-led firm. Amodei had refused to accede to Pentagon demands for exclusive and unfettered access to tools of Anthropic for military purposes. Subsequently, Pentagon had roped in OpenAI.
Experts noted that the US move to curb exports of Anthropic AI tools amounts to weaponizing the technologies. The military usage, including espionage, of the AI tools has been already documented in the recent episodes of the US military abducting former Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and the killing of ex-Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei in April this year.
It’s more pertinent that the US bid to control the access to the advanced tools of Anthropic is similar to China’s control of the export of critical minerals. Beijing in a series of measures has curbed access to rare earth to pressurize nations in following China.
Beijing’s exploitation of Chinese domination over rare earth and critical minerals has been described as geopolitical leverage. The US seems to be taking cues from China playbook to restrict the access to advanced versions of the AI tools.
“The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees,” said Anthropic in a statement on Saturday.
It stated that “the net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.” The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern, added the AI firm.
The Trump administration has been insisting that the world must buy the American AI stacks. With GPUs costing billions of dollars, the access to advanced AI tools and gaining technological prowess may remain restricted, giving scale of hegemony to the US and China.
“Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5… In the weeks leading up to the launch of Fable, Anthropic worked with the US government, the UK AISI, multiple private third-party organizations and internal teams to red-team Fable’s safeguards for thousands of hours in total,” the statement read.
It also stated that “no testers have yet been able to find a universal jailbreak—a jailbreak method that can very broadly bypass the model’s safeguards, unblocking a wide range of cyber capabilities.”
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