Days after reports emerged that India had gained access to Anthropic’s cybersecurity-oriented AI model under a limited international partnership, the US government has ordered the company to suspend access to two of its specialised programmes for all foreign nationals, including Indians, citing national security authorities.

Anthropic, the San Francisco-based maker of the popular large language model Claude, said in a blog post that it had received the directive on June 12 at 5:21 pm (Eastern Time). The order requires the company to halt access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, irrespective of whether they are located inside or outside the United States, and even applies to foreign employees working at Anthropic.

“The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected,” the firm said.

Earlier this month, NDTV Profit reported that India had become one of a select group of countries granted access to Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview.

At the time, however, Anthropic had not specifically named India when announcing the expansion of Project Glasswing, under which around 150 new organisations were to be added following collaboration with government agencies, cybersecurity experts and open-source software maintainers.

“Each one will need to meet our security requirements before they gain access,” the company had said.

The latest restrictions have wider implications as they cover foreign nationals residing in the US, including employees of Anthropic itself, besides affecting overseas markets such as India. India represents 5.8% of total Claude.ai usage, making it the second-largest market after the United States.

The development also comes at a time when Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest software services exporter, has entered into a partnership with Anthropic to help enterprises scale AI adoption.

Anthropic noted in its blog that it had received the directive from the US government on June 12 at 5:21 pm (Eastern Time).

“The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern,” it said.

The company also questioned the rationale behind the restrictions. “We have instituted strong safeguards that greatly reduce the likelihood that Fable is misused for tasks related to cybersecurity (among others). In fact, our safeguards are so strong that many users have complained that they are overly broad,” it said.

“To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws,” it noted in the blog post.

The decision has reignited discussions in India over the need to build indigenous AI capabilities rather than relying on access to advanced US-developed systems.

“It completely changes things,” said Aakrit Vaish, founder of Indian AI venture platform Activate, told TechCrunch, referring to Anthropic’s decision.

“I think this materially changes the way all of us should be thinking about sovereign AI in India.”

With access to the two programmes now suspended worldwide for foreign nationals, the episode is likely to intensify debates around technological self-reliance and the strategic importance of developing domestic AI infrastructure.