At 5:21pm Eastern on Friday, Anthropic received a directive from the U.S. government ordering it to suspend all access to its two most capable models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for any foreign national — inside or outside the country, including the company’s own foreign-born employees. Because no consumer AI company can sort its users by nationality in real time, the practical effect was a hard kill switch. By the time most people noticed, both models were already dark for everyone.

Palantir employees are openly questioning their company’s commitments to civil liberties as the Trump administration’s second term deepens relationships with ICE and the Department of Defense. Internal Slack logs and staff interviews, reported by Ars Technica, reveal a company caught between its foundational mission statements and the lucrative contract work that defines its business model.

The debate centers on a fundamental contradiction: Palantir built itself on data analytics for government agencies, but the Trump administration has weaponized those capabilities in ways that presume guilt and prioritize surveillance over due process. Employees invoking the company’s manifesto—ostensibly concerned with ethical governance—are bumping against a reality that the manifesto was always aspirational performance. Government contractors do not reject lucrative work on principle. They negotiate margins and liability.