Carney warns on AI reliance after U.S. blocks Anthropic

On Friday the U.S. issued an emergency export control directive ordering Anthropic to suspend access to its newest models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, for all foreign nationals whether inside or outside the United States, citing national security. Anthropic disabled the systems for foreign users immediately.

Anthropic complied with the order but disputed the basis, arguing the cited jailbreak can be reproduced on other public models. U.S. officials said the action followed concerns that a China-linked group had accessed Mythos. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter urging Anthropic to cut access.

Speaking in Ireland ahead of the G7 summit in France, Prime Minister Mark Carney warned the episode highlights the risk of relying on a small number of U.S. AI providers. He said, “The situation we’re in collectively right now with Mythos and Fable is something that can happen with overreliance on certain models,” and added, “It is never a good idea to have one option.”

Markets for tokens tied to decentralized AI rose after the Anthropic restrictions. The sector’s market capitalization reached about $24.3 billion, up roughly 6% on the day and about 12% over the week. Smaller compute and data network tokens led gains, with ChainOpera AI, io.net, Grass and NOVA posting weekly increases above 30%. Larger tokens in the space also advanced, with NEAR Protocol up about 16% and Bittensor rising nearly 28% over the same period.

The release of Claude Fable 5 drew separate criticism when users found a safeguard that quietly degraded responses for accounts suspected of attempting to build competing models. Anthropic apologized and said it would change that behavior.

Industry participants noted a structural tension between centralized and decentralized approaches to advanced AI. Dan Dadybayo of Horizontal Systems described reliance on a few central providers as a systemic risk “similar to what we saw in finance in 2008,” and said centralized platforms can be switched off by a single company complying with government directives. Peter Anthony, founder and CEO of Perceptron Network, pointed to rising compute and data costs as a driver of interest in alternatives but warned that if decentralized systems still run on chips supplied by a small number of cloud or GPU manufacturers, the chokepoint simply shifts.

Anthropic is approaching a valuation near $1 trillion and has reported annualized revenue of more than $47 billion. Regulators and industry participants are discussing model safeguards, access controls and export policies in the wake of the events.