Legal tech firm sues U.S. over Anthropic foreign access order

Legion LegalTech Corp sued the federal government in Washington, D.C., on June 23, arguing that a June 12 Commerce Department directive forced Anthropic to cut off access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals worldwide. The San Jose, California, legal-tech company said the order reached far beyond overseas users and immediately disrupted its own business.

Anthropic said the directive required it to suspend access to the two models for any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign-national employees at the company. Anthropic turned off access for all customers the same day it received the order. Legion said its Canada-based software development team was blocked from the tools it uses to build products.

The case is emerging as an early test of whether national-security regulators or private companies and their customers will control access to frontier AI systems. Legion asked the court to vacate and set aside the directive and is seeking preliminary relief that would block enforcement while the case proceeds. The company’s complaint turns a broad policy fight into a concrete commercial dispute over cross-border engineering work.

The directive came from the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, and a letter from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the models would be subject to export controls outside the United States and to foreign persons inside the country. Anthropic’s public statement said the restriction also covered foreign-national Anthropic employees.

The June 12 action drew attention because analysts said it appeared to be the first known use of export-control powers to restrict access to deployed AI model software itself, rather than hardware or chips. The Center for Strategic and International Studies said the move caused abrupt service disruptions and raised new questions for future U.S. AI policy. Legal commentary also noted that the government had not publicly disclosed the directive.

The shutdown landed only days after Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were launched, making the disruption especially sudden for customers who had already started building workflows around them. For U.S. firms serving international clients, the lawsuit signals that AI access can now be shaped as much by export law as by product design, with the impact felt immediately in software teams, customer operations and the broader legal technology market.