Three days after launch, the US government ordered Anthropic to pull its two highest-tier models off the market. Not suspend them for some users. Not restrict access by region. Pull them for everyone, everywhere — including Anthropic's own employees. The reason? A verbal claim from another company that someone had jailbroken Fable 5.
"We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people." — Anthropic
What actually happened
On Friday evening, Anthropic received an export control directive from the Commerce Department at 5:21 p.m. Eastern, citing national security authorities. The directive suspended access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national — inside or outside the United States. Because Anthropic's own workforce includes foreign nationals, the company concluded the only way to comply was to disable the models globally.
The trigger: a competing company claimed to have jailbroken Mythos. Axios reported the administration attempted to get Anthropic to delay the launch beforehand, failed, then sent the export control letter. Anthropic reviewed the alleged jailbreak demonstration and says it found a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities that other publicly available models expose without any bypass at all.
