Chris Ciauri stood in a Seoul ballroom on Wednesday and said something Anthropic had carefully avoided saying for six days: a number.
Not an exact one. But "within days" is the most specific timeline Anthropic's Managing Director of International has offered since June 12, when a US export control directive ordered the company to cut off every foreign national's access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, its two most capable models. The order was so broad, and the shared cloud infrastructure so hard to partition by nationality, that Anthropic disabled both models for every customer on Earth — Americans included on the cyber-focused Mythos 5.
"We are very confident that in the coming days, the models will become available again," Ciauri told reporters at the launch of Anthropic's new Seoul office.
It was meant to be a celebration of Korean expansion. Instead, it became the closest thing to a status update the public has had since the ban began — and a glimpse into how a company negotiates with a government that can switch off its flagship product with a single letter.
