Trump rejects UK plea for exemption from Anthropic AI ban

TL;DR:

  • US officials have signalled they will refuse Downing Street’s request for a British carve-out from the export order that locked foreign nationals out of Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models.
  • Anthropic met Commerce Department officials on Monday to negotiate, while more than 80 cybersecurity leaders signed an open letter urging the curbs be dropped.
  • For UK readers the rebuff sharpens a sovereignty problem Resultsense has tracked for weeks: Britain depends on US-controlled models and has no veto over when they are switched off.

The White House looks set to reject Sir Keir Starmer’s appeal to restore British access to Anthropic’s most capable AI models, with one source close to the president telling The Telegraph there was “zero chance” of a UK carve-out. The export order, served on Friday by the US Commerce Department, forced Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every user worldwide to stay compliant.

Washington’s rationale, and its limits

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said he acted because officials feared the models could be diverted to military intelligence users in China, Russia or other countries of concern, according to a letter to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei seen by Reuters. Senior Anthropic staff met Commerce officials in Washington on Monday — joined by National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross — to hammer out a fix. Export experts told Reuters the legal footing is shaky: AI models are reached through remote access, not exported, raising doubts over whether Commerce can lawfully impose the curb at all.

Pressure to reverse course is building from industry too. In an open letter, more than 80 security leaders at firms including Nvidia and Adobe argued the ban hampers efforts to find and patch software flaws, and that Anthropic’s models are only an incremental advance over rival systems such as China’s Kimi 2.7 that remain freely available.

Looking forward

Insiders expect Trump will ultimately strike a deal that rolls back the restriction for everyone rather than grant Britain a bespoke exemption. Business Secretary Peter Kyle declined to comment on the talks but pointed to “the need to scale British technology”, reviving calls for sovereign UK systems that cannot be switched off from abroad. As yesterday’s carve-out lobbying and the original suspension order showed, the deeper lesson holds: a single directive in Washington can pull tools British firms rely on, and rhetoric about sovereignty needs far more capital behind it to matter.

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