The European Commission said it had “taken note” of the decision by the US administration to restrict exports of Anthropic’s most advanced artificial intelligence models - Mythos and Fable - and is currently assessing “its implications” as well as “its practical consequences for European users of these services”.
While acknowledging that these models “offer significant benefits, including for cyberdefence”, the Commission stresses that they “also raise serious cybersecurity concerns that need to be addressed”.
“This is a shared challenge, not one confined to a single jurisdiction or company. We believe that contingency measures taken in this light should not be discriminatory against partners”, Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said.
The Commission also believes that this case illustrates once again “why Europe must strengthen its technological sovereignty”, just days after presenting its legislative package on the matter, designed to reduce the Union’s external dependencies in key areas such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence and semiconductors (see EUROPE 13880/1), and to leverage instruments such as the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), the Cyber Resilience Act and the NIS2 Directive “in order to manage these risks on its own terms”.
On 12 June, Anthropic announced that it had been forced to “abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all [its] customers” in order to comply with an export control directive issued by the US government on the grounds of “national security”. According to the company, this directive requires it to “suspend all access” to these two models “by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees”.
Anthropic specified that the US authorities “provided no specific details of [their] national security concern” in their letter. However, the company says it understands that “the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing or jailbreaking Fable 5’s proprietary coding system”. The company nevertheless insists that it has “strong safeguards” which “greatly reduce the likelihood that Fable is misused for tasks related to cybersecurity (among others)”, and that “no tester has yet been able to find a universal jailbreak”.
The company disagrees “that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people”. “We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe”, Anthropic states. (Original version in French by Ana Pisonero Hernández)