The US government has ordered Anthropic to bar foreign nationals from its two most capable AI models, and rather than try to enforce a nationality rule selectively across a shared cloud service, the company switched them off for everyone.
Anthropic disabled Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 worldwide late on Friday 12 June, three days after launching Fable 5 as its most powerful public model.
It is, by several accounts, the first export-control measure aimed at specific AI models rather than at chips or the hardware that runs them. The directive barred access by foreign nationals both inside and outside the United States, a scope that made selective enforcement on a multi-tenant service impractical and a global shutoff the path of least resistance.
The government’s concern, as Anthropic understands it, is a method of jailbreaking Fable 5, bypassing the guardrails meant to keep a model from producing dangerous output. The action followed a jailbreak published on X on 10 June by a well-known figure who claimed to have defeated the model’s safety controls.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!Anthropic says it reviewed the report it believes prompted the directive and concluded the capability shown is widely available from other models, naming OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 among them.
