Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Urged G7 Leaders Not to Splinter on AI After U.S. Blocked Foreign Access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Just days after the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to block all foreign nationals from accessing its two most advanced AI models — and the company responded by taking the models offline for everyone — the company's CEO faced world leaders at the G7 summit with a blunt message: do not let this moment fracture the global AI order.

Here is what happened, what Amodei urged the G7 to do, and how European allies reacted.

The U.S. Commerce Department's Unprecedented Directive (June 12, 2026)

On Friday, June 12, 2026, the U.S. Commerce Department, under Secretary Howard Lutnick, issued an export control directive to Anthropic citing national security authorities. The order required Anthropic to immediately suspend access to its two most advanced AI models — Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 — for all foreign nationals, including foreign national employees of Anthropic itself, both inside and outside the United States .

The models had been publicly released only days earlier, on June 9, 2026 . Secretary Lutnick stated the directive was necessary because the models' capabilities could be used by adversaries to "threaten the national security of the United States" .

Why Anthropic Disabled Them Globally

Anthropic said it had no practical way to distinguish foreign nationals from U.S. citizens in real-time across all users . Since the directive applied to "any foreign national" and the company couldn't reliably enforce nationality-based access, Anthropic chose to disable both models for all customers globally — not just foreign nationals . An Anthropic spokesperson said, "The net effect is we must remove access for all our customers" .

Key details:

• Fable 5 was described as an "exceptionally capable" model with advanced reasoning .
• Mythos 5 was Anthropic's most powerful frontier model, excelling in reasoning, software engineering, and vision tasks .
• The directive was the first time the U.S. government had ever ordered an AI company to cut off foreign access to a specific model . Anthropic received the directive at 5:21 PM ET on June 12 .

What Dario Amodei Urged G7 Leaders to Do (June 17, 2026)

At the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, on June 17, 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei joined a closed-door working lunch with leaders and other top AI executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. He urged G7 leaders not to splinter over building advanced AI tools and, alongside Hassabis, called for a U.S.-led coalition to set international AI standards and regulations .

According to reports from the Financial Times, CNBC, and Bloomberg Law, Amodei told leaders to "resist the temptation to splinter" on advanced AI . He specifically warned about what he called China's "open-source threat" and argued for a unified Western approach rather than a fragmented one .

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman separately proposed an international testing forum at the same session . No binding commitments emerged from the meeting .

Reactions at the G7

European leaders pushed back against the U.S. move, demanding what they called "AI sovereignty checks" and broader access to frontier models .

• European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said it was in the "mutual interest" of U.S. and European companies to work together: "We use each other's trusted technology, and our financial systems are interconnected. It is in our mutual interest that our citizens and companies can safely use the best AI models" .
• French President Emmanuel Macron urged wealthy democracies to work together on regulating advanced AI, and warned that if the U.S. "from one day to the next can turn off the switch," it could harm the economies of European customers .
• Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed that the U.S. could lead a coalition for AI standards, according to one person familiar with the discussions .

Global Repercussions

Industry reaction was mixed. Some security experts praised the U.S. move as prudent national security policy, while others warned it could accelerate fragmentation of AI development into rival blocs . Anthropic's own statement stressed that the company had complied immediately but described the situation as deeply disruptive to its global operations and customer relationships .

The incident marked a turning point in the geopolitics of artificial intelligence, as the world's wealthiest democracies confronted the reality that the U.S. can, and will, cut off access to frontier AI models on national security grounds — a power that unsettled America's closest allies.