Senior Anthropic staffers met Trump administration officials in Washington on Monday to seek the reversal of an export-control directive that forced the artificial-intelligence company to disable global access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models on Friday, according to a person close to the company who spoke to CNBC.
The sit-down is Anthropic's first direct attempt to dislodge an order that, in three days, idled the most advanced models the company sells and deepened a feud with the federal government that already includes a Pentagon supply-chain-risk designation and an active lawsuit. A favorable outcome would let paying customers back on the models; a stalemate leaves Anthropic's flagship products dark for the indefinite future.
What the order did
The directive Anthropic received Friday cited "national security authorities" and ordered the company to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 "by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States," CNBC reported. Rather than attempt to filter users by nationality, Anthropic shut the models off for every customer to comply. Semafor reported that the administration cited the models' cyber capabilities, noting that Anthropic had released Mythos only to a small set of organizations working on security vulnerabilities.
Pentagon backdrop
Monday's meeting follows months of public conflict between Anthropic and the Defense Department. The Pentagon designated the company a supply-chain risk in March, barring defense contractors from buying its technology on national-security grounds, CNBC reported. Anthropic sued the Trump administration to overturn the designation, and that case is still pending. Semafor reported that the Pentagon's move followed Anthropic's refusal to allow its models to be used in fully autonomous weapons.
Industry pushback
An open-source AI platform argued to Semafor that limiting foreign access to frontier models could backfire because attackers tend to rely on open-source systems that are already widely available, while defenders depend on the most capable commercial models to spot and patch vulnerabilities.
The administration has not signaled any softening. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X on Saturday that "every passing day" proves blacklisting Anthropic was "the right move," CNBC reported, a posture that has not shifted publicly in the 48 hours since. No administration official spoke on the record about Monday's meeting, and the dossier's reporting draws on center-leaning outlets only; the company's perspective dominates the available account because the government side has stayed silent beyond Hegseth's post.
Anthropic's lawsuit over the March designation remains before the courts, and the company has not said what it will do if Monday's meeting fails to lift the export order.