New Delhi: Days after it was reported that India is among a “select group of countries” granted access to the AI firm Anthropic’s cybersecurity-focused model, the US government has directed Anthropic to suspend all access to two programmes by any foreign national, including Indians.Anthropic is the maker of the popular large language model Claude.The San Francisco company announced in its blog that the US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.“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.Early in June, NDTV Profit reported that India has joined a select group of countries granted access to Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview.Anthropic had not mentioned India early in June when it announced that following several weeks of close collaboration with Project Glasswing partners, the security industry, open-source software maintainers, and the US government, it would be extending the partnership to approximately 150 new organisations. “Each one will need to meet our security requirements before they gain access,” it had said.The new ban affects foreigners currently in the US, including those working at Anthropic, to say nothing of an AI market like India. India accounts for 5.8% of total Claude.ai use, second only to the United States.The news also comes as Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest software services exporter, has partnered with Anthropic to launch an alliance to drive enterprise AI scaling.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 blog post also noted Anthropic’s skepticism over the US government’s stated safety hazards. “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 move has led to conversation within India of the country needing its own AI infrastructure instead of depending on the US.“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.”