In the 1990's the US government classified 128 bit SSL encryption as a munition under ITAR, putting privacy software in the same legal bucket as missiles and tanks. If you aren't familiar with SSL, it's the code that scrambles sensitive online data and triggers the little padlock icon in your browser to show a connection is safe. Because of this classification, Netscape and Microsoft had to develop two entirely separate versions of their web browsers to avoid severe export penalties. The Domestic Edition for the US and Canada shipped with full, secure encryption that couldn't be cracked, while the International Edition for the rest of the world had its security systems intentionally broken by artificially capping the lock strength at a weak limit. This policy stifled global online shopping for years because international consumers were forced to run software that was easily cracked by design until the export laws were finally loosened in 2000.[1]
The White House has banned anyone who isn’t American from using Anthropic’s two newest AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Commerce Secretary Howard W. Lutnick set this out in a letter recently to Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei and the ban covers people outside the US, foreign nationals living inside it, and Anthropic’s own employees who aren’t US citizens. These models run on shared servers that people sign into from anywhere in the world, so Anthropic had no quick way to let Americans in and keep everyone else out. To comply on time, it switched both models off for every customer on the planet on 19 June. Every other Claude model still works normally. The government said it blocked access for national security reasons, claiming Fable 5 could bypass the safety controls Anthropic built into it. Anthropic disputes that claim, says the government has misunderstood the technology, and is trying to get access restored. Mythos 5 is the more powerful model and can identify software vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit. Fable 5 is the public version, with safeguards that route those requests to a weaker model.
The government acted after a rival company claimed it had found a way around those safeguards. Anthropic disputes that claim and says the only method described to it amounts to asking the model to review code and suggest fixes, something it says offers no meaningful advantage over other AI systems already available. A company released a commercial product, the US government decided foreign nationals couldn’t be trusted with it, and within days it was gone for tens of millions of paying customers worldwide. When the US decides something works against its own interest, it moves fast. Under this rule, a Nobel Peace Prize winner in Germany wouldn’t be allowed to use this AI, but a felon with 20 violent crimes in the US could. Britain, the EU, and Australia don’t behave this way. They keep handing sensitive government work to American companies like Palantir Technologies and Anduril Industries, companies built around US national security, whose leaders say openly that they serve American interests before every other customer. So, one government will switch a commercial product off overnight to protect itself, while the others sign contracts that hand control to companies from that same country. Walsh believes the lesson for anyone outside the US is that access to an American service can be taken away overnight because of where you were born and what Washington decides. If the EU or China banned an American technology for every US citizen and company, Washington would call it economic warfare.
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[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paulwalsh_in-the-1990s-the-us-government-classified-share-7471941579289702400-iGfl/
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