Alleged China ties at SK Telecom alarmed US officials and triggered Anthropic crisis

US officials grew alarmed over alleged China ties at SK Telecom, leading the White House to demand Anthropic cut off the South Korean telecom giant's access to its AI model Claude Mythos. The incident, combined with security flaws in Anthropic's Fable 5 model flagged by Amazon and others, caused the White House to lose confidence in Anthropic and force both models offline worldwide.

Alleged China ties at SK Telecom alarmed US officials and triggered Anthropic crisis WIRED reports on a possible trigger for Anthropic's decision to shut down its AI models Claude Mythos and Fable 5: South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom had access to Mythos through Anthropic's partner program Project Glasswing https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-scales-project-glasswing-to-150-partners-across-15-countries-to-hunt-critical-software-flaws/ . US officials grew alarmed over what they saw as SK Telecom's alleged ties to China. The White House told Anthropic to cut off SK Telecom's access. The company complied right away. SK Telecom denied any China connections to a Korean newspaper https://www.chosun.com/english/world-en/2026/06/16/PBE4LOQZQNCNRPQ3WKZTUL6FKI/ . But the company is part of the broader SK Group, which has major business interests in China and held a stake in the state-owned Chinese carrier China Unicom until 2009. Things got worse shortly after, when Amazon and other companies flagged security flaws in Fable 5 https://the-decoder.com/amazon-and-five-other-companies-reportedly-triggered-the-government-crackdown-on-anthropics-fable-model/ that could be used to bypass safety restrictions. Together, the two incidents caused the White House to lose confidence in Anthropic and force both models completely offline https://the-decoder.com/us-government-forces-anthropic-to-disable-claude-fable-5-and-mythos-5-for-all-customers-worldwide/ . AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now WIRED https://www.wired.com/story/sk-telecom-anthropic-mythos-export-controls/ main-content