anthropic

The company said it received ⁠an export control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals.

The AI firm Anthropic has blocked access to its newly released cutting-edge software, following an order by the United States government.

In a blog post published Friday, the company behind the Claude chatbot said government agencies had instructed it to prevent all foreign nationals from accessing the AI models Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns.

Anthropic said it received the order at 5:21pm (21:21 GMT) on Friday and that the letter did not explain the government’s specific security concern in detail.

The ban also affects foreigners currently in the US – including those working at Anthropic.

As a result of the order, the company had to cut off access for everyone at short notice, it said.

The artificial intelligence behind Anthropic’s Mythos AI model is particularly adept at detecting software vulnerabilities, some of which have remained undiscovered for decades.

This capability has been used by US authorities and selected companies to plug security gaps.

However, a concern from the outset has been that such AI could become a dangerous cyberweapon in the wrong hands.

The Fable 5 model, released just this week, is based on Mythos technology, but its cybersecurity and biotechnology capabilities are blocked.

Mythos 5 is the non-public full version, which should continue to be used only by government agencies and selected corporate partners to harden their systems.

Anthropic emphasised that it had so far received only partial information from the government.

The company said it had reviewed a report which, in its assessment, was likely to have triggered the order.

Anthropic’s experts concluded that this referred to a limited capability to use the AI to review specific programme code and correct errors.

Models from other providers, such as GPT-5.5 from rival OpenAI, also possess this capability, the company stressed.

Anthropic said it disagreed that software used by hundreds of millions of users should be blocked for this reason, and that the safety measures in Fable 5 have been extensively tested.

Earlier this month, Anthropic proposed that the world’s top artificial intelligence companies coordinate to pause development of advanced AI systems, warning that the technology is improving so quickly that there is a risk humans would lose control.

The company said in a blog post in early June that, as cutting-edge AI gets increasingly faster at carrying out tasks, “it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause” its development.

June 5 (UPI) — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic issued a warning about systems that can improve themselves and said that humans need a way to intervene when necessary.

AI systems will soon be able to better themselves — known as “full-recursive self-improvement” — and that has a lot of benefits, like for health care and science. But just like science fiction movies warn, it could cause serious risks to people, said Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and leader of the Anthropic Institute Marina Favaro in a recent blog post.

“Full recursive self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems,” the blog said. “If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more important.”

Clark called for the industry to give itself a “brake pedal” on CNN Thursday.

“When I look down at the car we’re driving, all I have is a gas pedal. I don’t have a brake pedal, and surely at some point in the future we might want that option,” he said. The inability to validate, verify and trust AI’s behavior is risky, he added.

Clark told CNN that countries have made similar changes in the past.

“We’ve done this before. In the height of the Cold War, under highly tense situations between rivalrous countries, they found ways to stabilize aspects of the nuclear arms race,” he said “All of this has been done before in other domains, and it may need to be something we do in the domain of AI.”

But critics say this talk of curbing AI is nothing new, even from Anthropic, which battled the Pentagon when it wanted full access to use its AI product.

In July 2025, Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. But CEO Dario Amodei said that Anthropic’s AI model Claude could not be used for mass surveillance in the United States or for autonomous weapons without human approval.

On Feb. 27, the Pentagon gave Anthropic a 5 p.m. deadline to comply with its demands that the government be able to use the service as it sees fit. Before the deadline, President Donald Trump announced that no government workers would be allowed to use Anthropic.

Then, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth labeled the company a supply-chain risk, which blocked it from any government contracts, but a judge struck it down in March.

“Anthropic might give the impression of being warm and fuzzy, but their definition of AI safety is narrow,” Steven Murdoch, a professor at University College London, told The Guardian. “Supporting U.S. authorities in the development of offensive capabilities has never been something they have spoken against.”

Murdoch said Anthropic’s blog left out evidence that AI is close to self-improvement.

“It is true that there’s some evidence that AI capabilities have increased and continue to increase with no limits becoming immediately clear,” he said. But, “I don’t think anything has fundamentally changed today that has caused Anthropic to publish this article.”

Murdoch pointed out that Athropic’s call for a pause on AI was similar to other proposals it has made in the past.

“It’s a reminder of what they are concerned about and have been concerned about for many years. I’m sure the attention is welcome, but again this isn’t a new thing,” Murdoch said. “Anthropic have been trying to get the attention of policymakers since they were founded.”

Anthropic is proposing that the world’s top artificial intelligence companies come up with a coordinated way to pause development of advanced AI systems, warning that the technology is improving so quickly that there’s a risk humans would lose control.

The company behind the Claude chatbot said in a blog post on Thursday that, as cutting-edge AI gets increasingly faster at carrying out tasks, “it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause” its development.

Anthropic said its internal research institute plans to explore the issue in collaboration with others and “take actions” to help build the systems for a credible slowdown or pause, without being more specific.

Anthropic rival OpenAI argued for a different approach in a report published on Wednesday, saying that “democratic governments — not private companies acting alone — must ultimately determine the rules, safeguards, and accountability mechanisms”.

“Our view is that decisions about the pace of AI innovation should not be left to any one lab, company, or special interest group,” it said.

AI models are getting faster, with rapid increases in how quickly they can carry out software tasks like coding on their own, Anthropic said in its post. Based on current trends and given enough computing power, an AI system could be able to design and develop its own successor, in what is known as “recursive self-improvement”.

Self-building AI would be a major technological milestone that would bring benefits in science, healthcare and other areas, Anthropic said, but it “also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems”.

Some tech industry figures have long warned of such a scenario.

Anthropic’s post comes after a different warning this week from a team of researchers at the University of Toronto who showed how AI tools could be used to create a new kind of AI “worm” that adapts its hacking strategy as it spreads from device to device and takes over a vast computing network.

“I think it’s really important that people understand that it’s not just the biggest, most powerful language models that pose the security concerns,” lead researcher Nicolas Papernot said in an interview.

The authors of the Anthropic post, company cofounder Jack Clark and Marina Favaro, head of its research institute, said the pause would be used to enable “societal structures and alignment research” to keep up with AI advances. Alignment is industry shorthand for making sure the technology matches human values and intentions.

The proposed coordination would let advanced AI labs verify that global rivals have actually stopped or slowed their work, “and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret”.

The company said a coordinated global mechanism is needed because, without it, a slowdown in AI development could let the “least cautious” players catch up and add to pressure on companies and governments as they make tough choices about AI safety.

Fears that advanced AI systems may get out of human control and cause societal harm have risen as the technology becomes increasingly capable. Anthropic’s own Mythos model sent shockwaves through industries, including banking and software, earlier this year with its ability to find vulnerabilities in existing code.

But regulation has been slow, especially in the US, where most leading AI labs are based. A Trump administration executive order earlier this week put the onus on the labs themselves, asking them to voluntarily submit their most capable models for government cybersecurity testing before public release.

Safety focus

AI researchers have also urged a pause before, but have had little success. Elon Musk, who owns AI lab xAI, was among the backers of a 2023 push by the non-profit Future of Life Institute to halt AI development for six months to allow time for safety guardrails.

Anthropic has long positioned itself as a safety-focused AI lab. Earlier this year, it refused to let the US military use its models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, prompting backlash from the government, which put it on a national security blacklist, set to take effect later in 2026.

Anthropic’s post comes as the company and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI race to sell shares on the stock market, in an IPO that could value Anthropic at nearly a trillion dollars.

Papernot notified Canadian cybersecurity authorities prior to releasing his report, which shows how researchers developed the worm in a laboratory by using an “open-source” AI tool that is easy for software developers to cheaply access and modify.

“In the past, cyber attackers would focus on targets that are very high value,” he said. “Banking systems, hospitals, electricity grids, water treatment systems, schools.”

Papernot agreed that there should be more collaboration between companies, government agencies and academic researchers to develop countermeasures as AI-powered hacking tools supercharge the search for computer vulnerabilities.

“That old laptop you have in your basement that you don’t check on regularly doesn’t seem like a very high-value target, but it can be used as a launch pad to attack these higher-value targets,” he said. “Anything connected to the internet is now at risk because of how low the cost has become to mount these cyberattacks.”

“Society’s response was to come up with a sensible policy and regulatory framework that gave people confidence in oil and the benefits that oil could provide to the world, and meant that you didn’t have to worry about the personalities of the people leading the companies”, Clark said. “That’s clearly where we end up here.”

President Trump signed an executive order on artificial intelligence Tuesday, less than two weeks after postponing a White House ceremony over his concerns that a similar policy could dull America’s edge on AI technology.

The order establishes a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release. The government will be able to work with trusted partners “that will have early access to covered frontier models to promote secure innovation and strengthen the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure,” the order says.

It was not immediately clear to what extent the order differed from the one he declined to sign on May 21.

Trump canceled an Oval Office event with tech industry executives last month because he did not like what he saw in the earlier version of the order’s text. “We’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead,” Trump told reporters at the time.

That directive was characterized as a voluntary collaboration with participating U.S.-based tech companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.

O’Brien writes for the Associated Press.

June 1 (UPI) — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic confidentially filed Monday for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission, joining SpaceX and OpenAI in plans to go public this year.

“This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review,” Anthropic said in a statement, CNBC reported. “The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors.”

That makes three prominent companies with IPO plans in 2026. SpaceX plans to debut next week, while OpenAI is preparing to file. Anthropic’s filing did not give any further information on timing, but it could go public as soon as this fall, The New York Times reported.

Last week, Anthropic passed OpenAI in valuation, reporting $965 billion as opposed to OpenAI’s $852 billion reported in March, CNBC reported. The company, based in San Francisco, is the creator of the Claude chatbot and the Claude Mythos Preview AI model. It has a focus on software coding.

Anthropic’s founders left OpenAI in 2021 to found the new company after concerns about OpenAI’s direction. Anthropic leaders have stressed safety in the use of AI, which caused issues with the U.S. Department of Defense after the company wanted limits on military and intelligence usage of its products.

President Donald Trump then called it a “radical left, woke company” and ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic products, while Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, called the company a supply chain risk to national security. Anthropic has sued the Trump administration to reverse the blacklisting, and that lawsuit is ongoing. Meanwhile, the company’s growth in the private sector has accelerated, CNBC reported.

Anthropic, which operates AI chatbot Claude, did not disclose the size or the terms of the offering.

Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic has confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States, teeing up what could become a watershed moment for Wall Street’s AI frenzy.

The move, announced on Monday, sets up a high-stakes test of whether investor appetite for the AI revolution that has reshaped white-collar work around the world can match the sky-high expectations surrounding the booming sector.

Anthropic, which operates AI chatbot Claude, did not disclose the size or the terms of the offering. Confidential submissions let companies advance IPO preparations while shielding sensitive financial details from rivals and the public.

Anthropic last raised $65bn at a post-money valuation of $965bn in late May, putting it ahead of rival OpenAI. The company said at the time it was making annualised revenue of $47bn from selling its technology to people and organisations using Claude to write code and do other work and personal tasks on their behalf.

The crucial step towards a listing comes on the heels of SpaceX’s mega-IPO, which is on course to rewrite the record books as the Elon Musk-led company pursues a $75bn offering at a $1.75 trillion valuation.

Anthropic was formed in 2021 by ex-OpenAI leaders, and now both AI firms, along with Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company SpaceX, are all expected to become publicly traded. All three are also still losing more money than they make, fuelling concerns of an AI bubble.

OpenAI and Anthropic have become the face of the AI boom that has redrawn corporate strategies, sparked a global arms race for computing power and talent, and turned AI-linked companies into some of the market’s most richly valued firms.

Anthropic’s rapid rise in early 2026 rattled markets, triggering sharp sell-offs in software and IT stocks as investors worried its increasingly autonomous AI tools could upend traditional business models and accelerate disruption across industries.

“OpenAI and Anthropic are in a race to go public before capital runs out,” said analyst Gil Luria from the investment firm DA Davidson.

“The other reason for Anthropic to try to beat OpenAI out to the public market is that they will get to set the agenda for how a frontier model reports financials and do so in a way that is favourable to their financial model.”

OpenAI is also preparing to confidentially file for a US IPO in the coming weeks, adding to a wave of blockbuster ‌listings anticipated in the year ahead.

A market milestone

As many blockbuster listings race towards public markets, companies from SpaceX to AI giants are competing for a finite pool of investor capital.

“The combined demand for capital from SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic will be so considerable that it is likely to create disruptions in the capital markets, so going early will be a great advantage,” Luria said.

The listing would represent one of the most consequential stock market debuts in years, potentially reshaping benchmark indexes, investor flows and the broader narrative driving US equities.

At close to a $1 trillion valuation, Anthropic would vault into the top tier of the S&P 500, alongside a handful of elite companies that dominate global equity markets.

An Anthropic debut would be a major boost for the long-sluggish IPO market, though experts and bankers warn an offering of such scale could drain liquidity and investor attention from smaller listings.

Published on
04/05/2026 – 13:15 GMT+2

The major AI company Anthropic is exploring a potential partnership with the British semiconductor firm Fractile to secure a steady supply of chips for custom inference and reduce the significant overheads associated with current semiconductor solutions.

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According to reports, these talks represent a strategic effort by the San Francisco-based firm to decrease its dependency on Nvidia whilst enhancing the speed and efficiency of its current and next-generation models.

As the global demand for generative AI capacity continues to climb, the financial burden of the hardware required to run these systems has become a primary hurdle for developers.

Anthropic, which has received multi-billion-dollar investments from both Amazon and Google, currently relies heavily on Nvidia’s H100 units alongside custom processors provided by its cloud partners.

However, the high market price and limited availability of these industry-standard chips have squeezed profit margins, prompting firms to look elsewhere.

According to industry analysts, a deal with a specialised firm like Fractile could allow Anthropic to exert greater control over its technical infrastructure.

This strategy reflects a broader trend among tech giants, including Microsoft and Meta, who are increasingly moving away from general-purpose chips in favour of internal or boutique designs.

A shift in memory architecture and a boost for British technology

Founded in 2022 by Oxford PhD Walter Goodwin, Fractile has gained significant attention for its unconventional approach to processor design.

Unlike standard chips that must constantly shuttle data between the processor and separate memory modules, Fractile’s “memory-compute fusion” architecture keeps data directly on the chip using static random-access memory, or SRAM, which does not need to be refreshed.

According to the British start-up, this method can run large language models up to a hundred times faster than existing hardware while lowering operational costs by 90%.

While these performance claims are impressive, the technology is still in the development phase.

Fractile has not yet launched a commercial product, and its specialised chips are not expected to be ready for full-scale data centre deployment until 2027.

Despite the long timeline, the start-up is reportedly in negotiations to raise $200 million (€170.5m) in funding at a valuation exceeding $1 billion (€853m).

The potential partnership highlights the growing significance of the UK’s semiconductor sector on the world stage. If a formal agreement is reached, Fractile could become Anthropic’s fourth major chip supplier, joining the ranks of Nvidia, Google and Amazon.

According to market reports, the discussions remain at an early stage and no binding contract has been signed.

However, the interest from a major player such as Anthropic suggests that in the AI race, the ability to deliver faster and cheaper compute power is the defining factor.