Howard Lutnick's directive did not merely restrict Anthropic's international distribution — it inserted the Commerce Department into what had been a product decision. Foreign nationals accessing Fable 5 and Mythos 5 now require US government sign-off, which means every enterprise sale and every API integration that crosses a border is contingent on federal approval. That is a different kind of constraint than export compliance for hardware; it is real-time gatekeeping over a service that Anthropic's entire revenue model depends on scaling.
The employees who questioned the ban are not naive about the regulatory environment — Anthropic has been more engaged with Washington than any other frontier lab. Their dissent signals something specific: the ban reads, from inside, as a penalty rather than a precaution. Amodei called for mandatory third-party testing