For the first time, the United States government has switched off frontier artificial intelligence and forced the world to go without it. Two of the most capable AI systems ever built, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, went dark last week. Not just in China or Iran. A researcher in London, a developer in Tokyo, an entire company in Berlin, all cut off at once, all treated as equally dangerous.

A letter reached Anthropic at 5.21 on a Friday afternoon from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, citing national security authorities. It told the company to suspend access for every foreign national, anywhere in the world. There is no switch that lets in Americans and keeps out everyone else. To comply, Anthropic said it had to take the models down for all users at once.

On a commercial chatbot, America’s allies were handed the same blackout as China, an authoritarian rival

On a commercial chatbot, America’s allies were handed the same blackout as China, an authoritarian rival

The precedent should alarm anyone who believes a serious government acts through evidence and law, not panic. Strip away the national security language and we are left with a new and dangerous precedent – the government’s conviction that it can switch off all software, anywhere, by writing a letter.

I have spent a career on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and as a correspondent who covered China, arguing that the West is too casual about handing its hardest technology to its adversaries. I take the cyber risk of these models seriously.

So take it from this hawk: this was not how you act on a real threat. The government moved in hours, on evidence that Anthropic disputes, and it reached for a Cold War export doctrine and stretched it to breaking point.

Anthropic is an awkward company to defend. For years now, it has told everyone AI models were dangerous. It built its brand on the warning, pressed Washington to take the threat seriously and got its wish. Dario Amodei, its chief executive, has said the world underestimates how good and how bad this technology could become. Now the government has turned that fear back on Anthropic, and not for the first time. The Pentagon had already branded the company a national-security risk after Anthropic refused to let its AI be used for........

© The Spectator