Anthropic Korea Representative Director Choi Ki-young, left, and Anthropic Managing Director of International Chris Ciauri take questions from reporters during a press conference at Conrad Seoul in western Seoul on July 17.ANTHROPIC KOREA
Anthropic is confident in re-enabling access to its frontier AI models soon, according to an executive at the U.S. AI giant, following the White House’s directive to block Mythos and Fable 5 for foreign nationals.
“We are very confident that in the coming days, the models will become available again,” said Anthropic's Managing Director of International Chris Ciauri during a press conference in Seoul on Wednesday.
Following the directive citing security risks, Anthropic blocked the models altogether inside and outside the United States.
The press event was initially intended to mark Anthropic’s expansion in Korea, but questions about the recent export control and Project Glasswing dominated. Glasswing is a cybersecurity initiative launched by the California-based firm to grant only select entities access to Mythos in response to the potentially disruptive capabilities of the model.
Tom Brown, one of the company's co-founders, was originally slated to appear with Anthropic Korea Representative Director Choi Ki-young, but was replaced at the last minute.
Anthropic Managing Director of International Chris Ciauri speaks during a press conference at Conrad Seoul in western Seoul on July 17.ANTHROPIC KOREA
Korea has been at the center of the ongoing controversy surrounding the White House order, after the Washington Post reported that a Korean telecommunications company with access to Claude Mythos triggered the U.S. directive due to its suspected ties to China.
Project Glasswing currently has approximately 150 partners — according to Anthropic — including firms such as Google, Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple. Korean participants include Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and SK Telecom.
Mythos can detect flaws in what had been believed to be unbreakable code, meaning that in theory, a single prompt by a bad actor could have devastating repercussions. Anthropic claims that the impact could be so immense that it withheld Mythos from public access.
Despite the heightened attention, the executives declined to comment on most questions related to the shut-down of its top-tier AI models.
Instead, they devoted much of the time to emphasizing the strategic importance of the Korean market.
“We have a sound and growing user base consisting of developers and graphic designers,” Choi said, adding that Korea ranks at 12 in terms of usage.
Ciauri also cited Korea as one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, hinting at further investments and headcount for the region.
“We are deepening our investments in Korea. We already have started building a team as we have commercial people technical people policy and operation staff and we'll continue to grow that business quickly in the coming months,” he said.
Still, some industry insiders warn that the recurring clash with the U.S. government could undermine the reliability of Anthropic’s service.
“However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people,” it stated following the measure.
