The U.S. government’s decision to temporarily block foreign access to the advanced artificial intelligence (AI) tool Mythos earlier this year renewed debate over whether technical safeguards could reliably withstand determined state-backed adversaries like North Korea.

Although the restrictions were quickly eased after Anthropic — Mythos’ maker — agreed to additional safeguards, the episode marked one of the clearest signs yet that Washington views frontier AI not simply as a commercial technology, but as a strategic asset with national security implications in a global AI arms race.

For the DPRK, whose cyber operations have become an