China may have accessed Mythos

The White House imposed export restrictions on Anthropic's Mythos AI model amid fears that a group linked to China may have accessed it, posing a serious national security risk. The Chinese government could potentially reverse-engineer the model through distillation, though the White House has not confirmed the report and Anthropic denies China was raised in discussions.

According to a new report from Semafor https://www.semafor.com/article/06/13/2026/white-house-move-to-limit-anthropic-linked-to-concerns-about-chinese-access-to-mythos , the White House’s decision to impose export restrictions /ai-artificial-intelligence/949553/anthropic-fable-5-mythos-5-government-national-security on Anthropic’s Mythos was driven in part by fears that it had been accessed by a group linked to China. If the Chinese government actually had access to Mythos 5 or Fable 5, it would present a serious national security risk. The government could also attempt to reverse engineer the model through distillation https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/knowledge-distillation , a method in which a “student” AI is trained on a more advanced model to replicate its behavior. The White House has not confirmed this report, and a post on X by Trump advisor David Sacks https://x.com/davidsacks/status/2065853007619588171?s=46 did not mention China. Instead, Sacks focused on a reported ability for Fable and Mythos to be jailbroken /ai-artificial-intelligence/949601/amazon-anthropic-fablemythos-government-ban , something that Anthropic has denied. Anthropic has not replied to a request for comment, though a spokesperson told Semafor that the government did not bring up China during its discussions around export controls. If Mythos was accessed by the Chinese government, it wouldn’t be the first embarrassing /ai-artificial-intelligence/917644/anthropic-claude-mythos-breach-humiliation breach of Anthropic’s most powerful model. The company has said that Mythos is too dangerous and powerful for public consumption, but a Discord group reportedly had access /ai-artificial-intelligence/916501/anthropic-mythos-unauthorized-users-access-security for two weeks before Anthropic discovered the breach and cut off access.