Class of AI Models Hyped as Scarily Powerful Apparently Scared the Government Too Much and Now They’re Disabled

Artificial Intelligence Class of AI Models Hyped as Scarily Powerful Apparently Scared the Government Too Much and Now They’re Disabled Who could have foreseen this? 13, 2026, pm ET Reading time 5 minutes © Photo / for HubSpot / Gizmodo composite Read Later Read Later Comments (28) According to a statement posted to its website on Friday, Anthropic was forced to “abruptly disable” two of its most prized frontier AI models in response to a highly restrictive U. S. government order. “We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible,” the statement says. The government action in question is an “export control directive” saying foreign nationals may not use the models inside or outside of the U. S., and it was motivated . But national security concerns, and other security and safety fears, have been at the center of the rollout of these models, which arguably made an event like this foreseeable. Rather than releasing its Claude Mythos Preview model to the public, in early April, Anthropic turned the creation of the model into a sort of consciousness-raising campaign about the ostensible dangers of frontier AI models. It released a system card explaining why the model wouldn’t be made publicly available, and detailing scary capabilities like deceptiveness and the ability to supposedly break containment from a limited system. It was also purportedly able to be helpful in the development of advanced weapons. For instance, the system card described it as “capable of significant cross-domain synthesis relevant to catastrophic biological weapons development.” At the same time, the company rolled out Project Glasswing, a program in which a limited group of partners and organizations were allowed to sample the model in order to learn what new horrors it could inflict on the world of cybersecurity. “We formed Project Glasswing because of capabilities we’ve observed in a new frontier model trained ,” the Anthropic blog post about Project Glasswing says. Soon, despite the inherent nerdiness of the topic, Mythos Preview was a tabloid story. An article in the New York Post cited computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy prophesying that in like of what Mythos heralds, AI may soon develop “hacking tools, biological weapons, chemical weapons, [and] novel weapons we can’t even envision.” The phrase “Weapons we can’t even envision” even made it into the headline. British government officials and leaders in the U. K. finance sector scrambled to form an action plan in light of the perceived danger.