China may have accessed Mythos

Semafor reports that White House export restrictions on Anthropic’s Mythos were partly driven by concerns that a China-linked group may have accessed the model. The report says access to Mythos 5 or Fable 5 could create a serious national security risk, including potential reverse engineering through model distillation.

The report underscores how frontier AI models are increasingly treated as strategic assets subject to export controls and geopolitical scrutiny. If model access can enable distillation, governments may push for tighter controls not just on chips and training infrastructure, but also on deployed AI systems and API access.