The Government Lets Anthropic Turn Its Top AI Models Back On

After eighteen days offline and a round of strengthened safety measures, the Commerce Department lifted the export restrictions. The episode left behind a precedent nobody has agreed on: a working off-switch for frontier AI.

The Commerce Department lifted its export restrictions on Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 today, after the company substantially strengthened the models' safety protections. Partial access had been restored a few days earlier. The two most capable AI systems available to the public were unavailable to anyone, anywhere, for about eighteen days.

For Anthropic the resolution is straightforward: it made changes, the government accepted them, and its products are back. For everyone else the episode has left a precedent, and the arguments about it are only starting.

The precedent is that an off-switch exists and works. A letter from a federal department, citing authority written for a different purpose in a different era, took the frontier of the technology offline within a day, and the company complied because it had no practical alternative. Analysts at policy institutes and law schools have spent the past two weeks debating whether the authority actually extends this far, and Congress's own research service has published a brief on it. Nobody disputes that it happened.

How you feel about that probably depends on which risk worries you more. If your fear is that these systems become too capable too fast with nobody able to intervene, then the last two weeks were a demonstration that intervention is possible — which is reassuring, and arrived faster than anyone expected. If your fear is concentrated power exercised without process, then the same two weeks showed that an unpublished letter can switch off a service used by hundreds of millions of people, with no hearing, no published standard, and no appeal.

Both readings describe the same eighteen days. The thing worth watching is what the next letter says, and whether anyone outside the room gets to read it.