US lifts restrictions on Anthropic's powerful AI models Fable and Mythos The United States government has lifted its restrictions on foreign access to Anthropic's most powerful AI models, the company has announced. Anthropic said late on Tuesday that it would begin restoring access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 from tomorrow after the US Department of Commerce notified the company that it had removed its export controls. In a letter to Anthropic that was widely circulated online, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the company no longer required an export licence as it had agreed to "proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models," to work with the government on standards for upcoming models, and to inform the government of "malicious activity". Anthropic abruptly shut off Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 last month after US President Donald Trump's administration ordered the company to restrict all foreign nationals, including company employees, from accessing the models. Anthropic said at the time that the government had not provided a specific reason for the order beyond unspecified national security concerns, but that it believed that officials were worried about security vulnerabilities in Fable 5. On Friday, the San Francisco-based company said that it had been granted approval to provide the models to US organisations that "operate and defend critical infrastructure", and that it was working with the government to restore general access for the public.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe speaks during a news conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington on April 6. | REUTERS WASHINGTON - CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Tuesday compared the capabilities of the most advanced artificial intelligence models to nuclear weapons in a tacit defense of Washington's recent hard line on controlling the release of the most powerful AI technology. "In conversations with many of the president's other national security and economic security advisors, we're talking about the impact of these frontier AI models," Ratcliffe said during a speech at the AWS summit in Washington. "It would be ... not misplaced to refer to their capabilities as akin to digital nuclear weapons," he said. On June 12, U.S. President Donald Trump's administration forced Anthropic, a leading American AI firm based in San Francisco, to cut off access to its two most powerful models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, by imposing an export control on them. The forced withdrawal of a frontier model by a government -- a first -- was only partially lifted on Friday for Mythos, now accessible to a restricted circle of U.S. partners, while Fable 5, its restricted consumer version, remains offline. OpenAI, Anthropic's American rival, launched its GPT-5.6 model the same day with very limited access, agreeing for the first time to let the U.S. government vet authorized partners on a client-by-client basis.

San Francisco's brightest minds are stuffing themselves into hacker houses. The living room of the Accler8 hacker house in San Francisco, where the author stayed for a week. O n a Friday in April, I hopped into an Uber to a fish market in San Francisco with a couple of tech founders on a mission to buy lobsters. Not for dinner, but for science: The duo dreamed of one day altering human consciousness, but they would start by toying around with some crustaceans. They intended to perform neurosurgery on the lobsters in the hopes of controlling them with an AI bot. Leading the way was Elliot Roth, a bearded 32-year-old wearing a black T-shirt with Longevity printed across the chest and a silver chain with a double-helix pendant. To push the boundaries of the five senses, Roth has implanted a magnet in his left ring finger.

Zurich has created a technology ecosystem nearing the density of Silicon Valley. Few places outside Silicon Valley can claim R&D hubs from all of these companies. Fewer still are concentrated in a city of just over 400,000 people--roughly half the size of San Francisco. Over the past two decades, however, many of the world's most influential technology companies have established R&D operations in and around Zurich, Switzerland. What began with Google's decision to build its largest R&D hub outside the United States has evolved into one of the world's most concentrated centers for AI research, talent, and commercialization, in certain areas at a higher density than Silicon Valley. The question is why so many technology leaders keep choosing the same place to build and scale.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) tours the UC Berkeley campus alongside Chancellor Rich Lyons ahead of announcing the Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search.

Why are airplanes so cold? From combating fainting to helping aircraft work efficiently, planes are chilly for a reason. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .

These luminous beetles use light to flirt and fend off predators. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . Growing up, Clyde Sorenson loved catching bugs, especially fireflies.

US artificial intelligence (AI) giant Anthropic has accused Chinese e-commerce and technology firm Alibaba of brazenly and illicitly extracting its Claude AI model's capabilities. In a letter sent to two members of the US Congress, the San Francisco-based company said operators linked to Alibaba carried out almost 29 million exchanges with Claude using thousands of fraudulent accounts in what it called the largest extraction campaign of its kind. Anthropic urged Congress to penalise the companies behind attacks like this and to ramp up measures to prevent US tech from being stolen. The BBC has contacted Alibaba for comment and requested more details from Anthropic. Anthropic's letter, dated 10 June and addressed to US Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, accused New York Stock Exchange-listed Alibaba of carrying out the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude's capabilities.

China beats U.S. with world's fastest supercomputer, but race not geared for AI work Workers at Elon Musk's xAI facility, which houses a large supercomputer known as Colossus, used for Artificial Intelligence (AI) data processing, in Memphis, Tennessee, on Sept. 11, 2025 | REUTERS SAN FRANCISCO - China has overtaken the U.S. to win the top spot on a list of the world's fastest supercomputers, but the results may say more about Beijing's desire to show self-sufficiency in computing systems than its standing in the global AI race, experts said. The LineShine system at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, uses domestically designed chips and won the top spot on the TOP500, a biannual global ranking of supercomputers, with the country's first listing in three years. The ranking comes as the U.S. and China are increasingly competing in advanced computing, with U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday signing an executive order that aims to put the U.S. ahead of China in the emerging field of quantum computing. In the June 2026 edition of TOP500, LineShine beat out the previous titleholder, El Capitan, a supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that the U.S. government uses to develop and maintain its nuclear weapons stockpile. But technology and policy experts said the results do not mean that China has the world's fastest computer for AI work because of changes in the computing industry in recent years and the methods used to compile the list.

The startup Coherence Neuro is now testing a brain-computer interface that could one day use electrical stimulation to prevent tumors from growing. A San Francisco startup with ties to Elon Musk's Neuralink has started testing its brain implant to detect and treat cancer in humans. Coherence Neuro says it temporarily placed its coin-sized implant in the brains of three people undergoing surgery to have brain tumors removed at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia. The implant was in place for roughly 30 minutes before being removed, providing an important safety check before the device can be implanted long-term in patients with brain cancer. Known as a brain-computer interface, the Coherence Neuro device is designed to sense the unique electrical signals of tumors and deliver mild electrical stimulation to prevent their growth.