TL;DRThe US government issued an export control directive on 12 June ordering Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns over a reported jailbreak. Anthropic complied but pushed back publicly, calling the action disproportionate and warning it would halt all frontier model deployments if applied industry-wide. The unprecedented recall came just three days after Fable 5 launched.
The US government has ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its two most capable AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, in what appears to be the first time Washington has forced a commercial AI product offline. The directive, which Anthropic says it received at 5:21pm ET on 12 June, cites national security authorities and demands the company cut off all foreign nationals, including its own employees.
Because Anthropic cannot reliably distinguish foreign nationals from domestic users in real time, the practical result is a hard shutoff of both models for every customer worldwide. Access to all of Anthropic’s other models remains unaffected.
Three days from launch to shutdown
Anthropic launched Fable 5 on 9 June as its first “Mythos-class” model available to the general public. Fable 5 is the public-facing version, with safety classifiers that route flagged requests to the weaker Claude Opus 4.8, while Mythos 5, the same underlying model with cyber safeguards lifted, was restricted to vetted cybersecurity defenders and critical infrastructure operators.
