The Trump administration’s haphazard and opaque interventions into artificial intelligence security matters could catapult Chinese alternatives into broader acceptance, posing new security risks altogether, a group of Democratic senators wrote to top administration officials Monday.

The five senators said that the administration’s handling has alternated between too passive, such as when OpenAI models escaped testing in the Hugging Face hack last month, and overstepping, such as when the Commerce Department suspended access for any foreign national to Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 in June.

“The Administration’s ad hoc and unpredictable approach undermines U.S. competitiveness, heightening market incentives to adopt open weight models from vendors based in the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” wrote Sens. Kristen Gillibrand of New York, Adam Schiff of California, Mark Warner of Virginia, Chris Coons of Delaware and Mark Kelly of Arizona.

In the Hugging Face hack, the senators wrote that “the Federal Government cannot be passive as these capabilities emerge.”

In the case of the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 suspensions, the senators said that the administration “utilized an infrequently used authority to direct Anthropic to suspend all access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals (including foreign national employees inside the United States) citing an undisclosed national security concern later described as a narrow jailbreak finding.”

Because Anthropic couldn’t immediately assess users’ nationality, the firm had to disable both models for everyone. The administration and Anthropic negotiated for 18 days behind closed doors before reaching an agreement, the lawmakers complained.

“While the Administration may have been responding to real security concerns to protect the United States, even justifiable interventions can create broader harm if the standards and decision-making processes are opaque, ad hoc, or unpredictable,” they said in their letter to leaders in the White House, Office of the National Cyber Director and departments of State, Treasury and Commerce. “Moreover, when the Executive Branch exercises authority delegated from Congress, such as in the conduct of export control administration, it is essential that it keep Congress fully apprised of its actions and procedures.”

During the time Anthropic was under export controls, the stock price of “an entity-listed Chinese lab” nearly doubled, the senators said. And while Hugging Face was breached, the company “had to” rely on a Chinese open-weight model due to guardrails on U.S. frontier models.

“If American models are perceived as subject to sudden access disruptions based on a black-box U.S. Government process, or as unreliable because U.S. AI labs are overcorrecting in the face of this black-box process, companies and governments in the United States and abroad may hedge by adopting Chinese or other foreign models instead,” the senators contended. “That outcome would undermine U.S. technological leadership while increasing exposure to systems that may carry risks of PRC or otherwise directed censorship, espionage, IP theft, and other supply chain security risks.”

Their letter asked for answers to questions about the standards the administration uses to determine the national security risks a frontier model presents, what legal authorities it will use to invoke restrictions, which agencies are responsible for which decisions and more.

None of the offices or departments the letter was addressed to immediately responded to a request for comment.

The letter follows inquiries at the state level, where 15 attorneys general asked OpenAI for more information regarding the security incident at Hugging Face.

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Members of Congress responded with skepticism and caution Tuesday to the Trump administration’s decision to impose export controls on Anthropic’s newest AI models.

The Friday order, which Anthropic said forced it to disable its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 artificial intelligence models, was prompted by what the administration said were national security concerns that a large number of cybersecurity professionals have dismissed as ill-founded.

Several Hill Democrats told CyberScoop they were concerned that the administration’s decision was driven by other considerations. Notably, the administration has feuded with Anthropic over use of its models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, said he would need to be convinced it was a legitimate national security order and hadn’t yet seen a full justification.

“What they did was pretty extreme, and I’d want to see what the basis was, as opposed to all the other issues that are swirling around in cybersecurity,” he said. “I’m a little skeptical because of their otherwise announced antipathy to this company.”

Leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee had contrasting takes, with Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., offering a two-pronged response and the top Democrat on the panel, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, panning the order.

“The administration is right to treat advanced AI cyber capabilities as a national security issue, especially when foreign adversaries and cybercriminals are actively looking for ways to weaponize these tools,” Garbarino said in a statement. “At the same time, we need to make sure our response does not unintentionally disadvantage American companies, allied partners, or critical infrastructure defenders who need access to the best secure tools available in order to protect our networks here at home.”

The United States, not China, needs to set standards for trusted AI, Garbarino said.

But Thompson said the order adds evidence to the appearance that the Trump administration doesn’t “have a coherent plan for mitigating the cybersecurity risks” of frontier AI models, he told CyberScoop in a statement.

“AI regulations should rely on standards and procedures that provide confidence to the public that decisions are based on the evidence and not on politics,” he said. “Instead, the Trump administration has adopted an ad hoc approach where decisions are made by political appointees in the White House rather than experts and where companies are left guessing on how to comply.”

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, had also previously highlighted the administration’s quarrel with Anthropic in response to the order in a statement to CyberScoop.

Behind the scenes, the administration and Anthropic were reportedly continuing to try to forge a truce Tuesday. More broadly, the administration’s AI executive order had a rocky rollout as the administration swung back-and-forth on how involved the government should be.

Some lawmakers deferred on commenting Tuesday, such as Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., who told CyberScoop he didn’t have anything to say on the order.

Others said they were still seeking information from the administration.

“I have not had the opportunity to get a brief specifically as to the logic, the reasoning behind it, and so forth,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, the South Dakota Republican who chairs the Armed Services Subcommittee on Cybersecurity. “So I’m going to withhold judgment until I get an opportunity to get the rest of the story, so to speak.”

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Last Friday, the Trump administration sent a shock through the tech ecosystem when the Department of Commerce levied export controls on Anthropic’s new AI model Fable 5.

Anthropic has taken steps to limit the risks around the commercial sale of its Mythos model, including declining to release it publicly, funneling it to organizations for cyber defense and developing guardrails for Fable 5 that would default its answers to older, less powerful models around sensitive topics like cybersecurity and biological warfare.

But the Trump administration was reportedly alarmed by recent reports from Amazon and another cybersecurity researcher claiming to have jailbroken Fable 5 within days of its public release, and determined that if researchers in the U.S. could jailbreak the model, so could America’s foreign adversaries.

The Commerce Department’s decision spurred Anthropic to shut off the models for all users as they attempted to convince the White House to change course.

But some cybersecurity and AI experts have sharply disagreed with the White House’s actions, saying the research has not demonstrated that anyone has been able to circumvent Fable 5’s safeguards and access the kind of dangerous new capabilities that have worried officials.

Katie Moussouris, a well-known cybersecurity expert, said Monday that Anthropic provided her with a copy of third-party research on guardrail bypass techniques for Fable 5.

According to Moussouris, the researchers asked three Claude models – Fable 5, Mythos and Claude Opus – to review batches of known, vulnerable open source code for security issues. Fable 5 initially refused the request, but the researchers were able to use “a multistep and manual process” to get Fable 5 to turn the output into automated scripts that could test patches for the vulnerability.

Third-party research since Fable 5’s release has not found ways to bypass its safeguards around hacking. The capabilities researchers have demonstrated are foundational to what makes Fable 5 and other frontier models valuable for cybersecurity defense.

“Defenders need to be able to ask AI to fix the bugs in a file, explain why the fix matters, and write tests that confirm the patch works,” she wrote. “That is not a guardrail bypass. It is the most valuable thing an AI model can do for defensive security: executing the find, fix, and test loop defenders run every day.”

Moussouris previously provided technical expertise to the Waasenaar Agreement, a voluntary multilateral security agreement around controlling exports for both munitions and dual use technology that includes the U.S. and dozens of other countries.  Based on the research she’s seen, she called placing export restrictions on all foreign sales of Fable 5 “heavy handed” and “misguided.”

Some lawmakers who in favor of higher regulations and scrutiny on the national security implications of AI were nevertheless critical of the White House decision. Senator Mark Warner, D-Va., told CyberScoop in a statement that while “there may be circumstances where restrictions on the export of frontier AI models are warranted,” those decisions must be “grounded in a transparent, risk-based process with clear rules and consistent standards.”

The Trump administration’s approach, he argued, has been the opposite, and he called for Congress to pass a statutory framework for testing and approving frontier AI models based on transparency, predictability and fairness.

“This administration has repeatedly shown a willingness to weaken export controls designed to protect our national security and maintain our technological edge over adversaries, while also making no secret of its hostility toward Anthropic,” said Warner. “That raises serious questions about whether this effort is being driven by objective national security concerns or something else.”

Anthropic said it subjected Fable 5 to 1,000 hours of testing from internal and external red team, reporting that no universal jailbreaks were found that would remove those guardrails or allow the model to access Mythos for cyber and biology work.

Moussouris is far from alone. She is one of dozens of cybersecurity experts who signed an open letter Monday calling on the Trump administration to “Free Fable.”    

The researchers say that while Mythos-class models are “quite good” at identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in software code, they “are not uniquely good” compared to other frontier models they use every day for cybersecurity defense.

For example, despite OpenAI’s Daybreak model offering similar vulnerability discovery and patching capabilities. It was not included in the Commerce Department’s restrictions.

The researchers also note that Fable 5’s guardrails have been notoriously oversensitive compared to other frontier models used by red teamers, becoming “a source of humor in the cyber community on launch day” as IT and cyber workers reported online that they couldn’t get the model to perform basic defensive cybersecurity tasks.

The letter questions whether the issues found in the jailbreaking reports would even qualify as offensive capabilities, and note they can be reproduced in other commercial and open-source models, including GPT 5.5, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet and Chinese models like Kimi 2.7.

“The justification for this unprecedented action was that Fable provides a unique ‘uplift’ of capabilities beyond other AI models, but AI has been finding bugs and generating working exploits at superhuman levels since last year,” they wrote.

The White House decision comes as AI companies face increasing backlash from a public that is now overwhelming calling for more robust government intervention.

A Johns Hopkins University poll in May found broad, bipartisan support for AI regulations, with 73% calling for bans on AI-generated images and video, 68% calling for labels on AI content, 75% wanting disclosure laws around when they interact with AI chatbots and 70% calling for “the right to interact with a human rather than an AI in medical, legal, educational and government settings.”

Another global survey of 18,000 people released this week found that the top four concerns most people have around AI all revolve around the tool’s ability to spread misinformation, create deepfakes to embarrass or hurt others, making it easier for criminals to hack into victim networks and helping terrorists create new weapons.

Senior reporter Tim Starks contributed reporting for this story.

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The U.S. government on Friday ordered Anthropic to immediately suspend foreign access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, its two most advanced artificial intelligence models, citing national security concerns tied to a reported method of bypassing the models’ safety restrictions. 

The directive, issued late Friday afternoon by Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick in a letter to Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei, placed the two models under export controls that prohibit use by foreign nationals, whether inside or outside the United States. 

Because of the scope of the restrictions, which includes foreign-born Anthropic employees, the company announced Friday evening that it disabled the models to ensure compliance. Access to the company’s other AI models was not affected. 

Fable 5 and Mythos 5 had been released earlier this week, with Anthropic describing them as the most capable systems it had ever deployed. Mythos was available to members of Project Glasswing, which allowed selected cybersecurity companies to use the model to identify and address security flaws.

It’s unclear how the Commerce Department action affects Project Glasswing. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

The Commerce Department‘s letter did not detail the specific national security concern. In its blog post Friday night, the company said its understanding is that the government became aware of a technique for “jailbreaking” Fable 5, a term for methods that circumvent a model’s built-in safety guardrails. According to Anthropic, the government provided only verbal evidence of what it described as a “narrow, non-universal jailbreak,” which essentially involved prompting the model to read a specific codebase and identify software flaws. 

Anthropic disputed the severity of the finding. The company said it reviewed a report it believes formed the basis of the government’s directive and found that the capabilities demonstrated were already available in other publicly accessible models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. The company said those same capabilities are used routinely by cybersecurity professionals for defensive purposes. 

Katie Moussouris, chief executive of the cybersecurity firm Luta Security, posted on BlueSky Saturday that the issue stems from “Defense Oriented Prompting,” a security-first method of engineering AI system instructions that treats natural language as code.

Other reports claimed that Amazon was responsible for flagging the security issues in the model. The company did not respond to CyberScoop’s request for comment. 

Anthropic acknowledged in its statement that perfect jailbreak resistance is not achievable for any model provider, and said it had designed Fable 5 around a “defense in depth” strategy, combining narrow jailbreak resistance with active monitoring. The company said no testers had found a universal jailbreak capable of broadly bypassing the model’s safeguards. 

“We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people,” Anthropic wrote. “If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”

Friday’s directive is the latest episode in a prolonged dispute between Anthropic and the Trump administration. In February, President Donald Trump moved to bar Anthropic’s products from federal agencies after the company sought stronger restrictions on how the Pentagon used its technology.

Despite that, as Anthropic released Mythos under Project Glasswing, the National Security Agency was given Mythos 5 to conduct offensive cyber operations. Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to bolster cyber defenses and establish a voluntary mechanism for the government to gain early access to powerful AI models before deployment. 

The administration’s stated rationale for Friday’s action drew widespread skepticism from researchers and analysts. Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, called the move “baffling.” Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said targeted export controls on model access could be a legitimate policy tool, but called the across-the-board restriction “highly questionable” and the deemed export provisions — which restrict foreign nationals inside the U.S. — “just absurd.” 

The broader implications for the AI industry remain uncertain. Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box, described the directive as “a big turning point for AI regulation,” arguing that the government’s willingness to deem specific models too powerful for certain uses establishes a precedent with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Other tech leaders in the government supported the action. 

“We fully support @POTUS and @SecWar in prioritizing national security and the security of our warfighters, DIB partners, critical infrastructure, international partners and allies,” DOD CIO Kirsten Davies wrote in a social post on X. “Some things are simply more important than revenue cycles, clickbait, and pre-IPO valuation. America First. Always.”

Anthropic said it believes the situation stems from a misunderstanding and is working to restore access as soon as possible.

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