After Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase Blocks Anthropic Access For Hong Kong Employees

JPMorgan Chase has ordered its Hong Kong staffers to stop using Anthropic's artificial intelligence (AI) models, days after the US-based tech company suspended access to Fable 5 and Mythos for foreign nationals, citing national security concerns. The Claude models have been removed from an internal drop-down list of approved large language models available to employees in the Asian financial hub, according to a report in the Financial Times.

The report highlighted that the decision was "based on the wording of Anthropic's usage terms in its licensing agreement with JPMorgan".

JPMorgan Chase's restriction on Anthropic's Claude follows a similar ban imposed by Goldman Sachs on its Hong Kong bankers in April, amid the rising US-China tensions over AI technology.

Hong Kong is not listed as a market where Anthropic's API and Claude.ai are officially accessible. However, international organisations have been able to circumvent geographic restrictions by negotiating global contracts and hosting activity outside China.

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Anthropic's Announcement

Last week, Anthropic was forced to suspend all access to its state-of-the-art AI model Fable after the US government asked it to limit access for foreign citizens, citing national security concerns.

Claude Fable 5 is a Mythos-class model that Anthropic released to the public after making it safe for general use. The original Mythos model was dubbed too powerful to be released to the world. At the time, Anthropic rolled out a preview of the model to a group of handpicked tech and cybersecurity companies.

However, days after the release of the general-purpose, toned-down model, the company released a statement about the abrupt suspension.

"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," Anthropic said in a statement.

"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 Claude models is not affected."

Anthropic said US national security authorities had not identified specific concerns.