SK Telecom, South Korea's largest wireless carrier, was among roughly 150 organizations added to Anthropic's Project Glasswing in early June
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SK Telecom’s footprint in China is minimal, generating roughly $1.9 million in Chinese revenue in 2024 and employing seven people in the country, according to its annual report. The national- security concern attaches instead to its parent, SK Group, whose affiliates hold extensive interests in Chinese semiconductors, energy, and other sectors.
Despite that relatively small footprint, the carrier has a deeper history within the country, having formed a wireless joint venture called UNISK with state-owned China Unicom in 2004. It then invested $1 billion in China Unicom convertible bonds in 2006 that converted into a roughly 6.6% stak, which was sold in 2009 for $1.3 billion. SK Telecom has kept a residual interest since then, listing a UNISK investment worth roughly $17 million in its 2025 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
SK hynix belongs to the same SK Group, and it received Mythos access in the same expansion, as did Samsung. The two rank among the largest suppliers of the memory and logic silicon that underpins AI hardware , and both joined Anthropic's funding round as strategic investors.
The export controls followed a separate dispute, however, when Amazon , Anthropic's largest investor with a cumulative stake of about $13 billion, flagged a guardrail bypass in Fable 5 to the White House after researchers prompted the model to read a codebase and fix its flaws, turning it into a vulnerability-discovery tool. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly raised the findings with administration officials directly, which then led to the Commerce Department’s order on June 12 barring all foreign nationals — including immigrants inside the U.S. — from accessing Fable 5 and the underlying Mythos 5.
U.S. gov't orders Anthropic to disable its newest AI models worldwide due to security threats
US government warned Anthropic that Fable 5 had been jailbroken, but firm 'refused' to fix before US implemented export controls
US pulls the 'kill-switch' on Anthropic's Fable 5 AI models, sending global allies scrambling
Rather than filter users by nationality, Anthropic disabled both models for everyone. The company said the demonstration it reviewed surfaced only a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities, and that banning a capability common to other frontier models would halt deployments across the industry.
About 100 cybersecurity professionals, including former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos and Luta Security's Katie Moussouris, signed an open letter arguing that while Mythos-class models are “quite good” at finding and weaponizing software flaws, they “are not uniquely good,” calling for the controls to be lifted.
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