The Koreas | Economy | East Asia

Anthropic’s Export Control Crackdown Leaves South Korea Caught in Washington’s AI Crossfire

The suspension of Anthropic’s most advanced AI model has exposed how Silicon Valley lobbying shapes U.S. export policy at the expense of allied economies.

On June 7, SK Telecom and Nvidia announced a partnership to build a gigawatt-scale AI cloud in South Korea. The deal positioned the country’s largest wireless carrier as a cornerstone of Seoul’s national AI strategy. Five days later, the White House ordered Anthropic to suspend all foreign access to its most advanced AI models. SK Telecom was also at the center of it.

The Trump administration’s June 12 export control directive forced Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users worldwide. The directive followed two separate incidents that eroded White House confidence in Anthropic. Days earlier, U.S. officials had ordered Anthropic to revoke access to Mythos for SK Telecom, which had joined Project Glasswing in early June. Officials cited the carrier’s alleged ties to China. SK Telecom denied the allegations, stating that the claims lack verified facts. Even after Anthropic complied shortly after, Amazon flagged a guardrail bypass, known as “jailbreak,” in Fable 5 to the White House, prompting the broader export control order.

Within the span of a single week, South Korea’s largest telecom secured a landmark AI infrastructure deal with Nvidia and then lost access to the foundational software it needed to make that infrastructure competitive.

For Anthropic, the irony runs deeper than bad timing.

The company has spent years building a public identity around the argument that Washington must use its regulatory power to constrain the global spread of advanced AI technology. In April 2025, Anthropic published an official position paper urging the Commerce Department to strengthen the AI Diffusion Rule, which was the Biden-era framework that imposed export controls on advanced AI chips. The paper argued that maintaining the United States’ compute advantage through export controls is essential for national security and economic prosperity. It called for tighter thresholds, stricter enforcement, and more funding for export control agencies.

Nvidia pushed back publicly, accusing Anthropic of telling tall tales and of trying to manipulate regulators rather than compete on merit. The exchange laid bare how corporate self-interest shapes export control advocacy in Washington. Anthropic relies on Nvidia hardware to train its model. Restricting Nvidia’s overseas chip sales artificially constrains demand, lowering chip prices for Anthropic’s domestic compute needs.

Federal records show Anthropic has spent nearly $5 million on federal lobbying since 2023, with the Commerce Department’s AI Diffusion Rule among its primary targets. But now the logic Anthropic helped build has turned against it. When the government applied that same national security logic to Anthropic’s own software exports, the company dispatched executives to Washington and contested the decision........

© The Diplomat