The US Commerce Department just did something it has never done before: it ordered a specific AI company to pull the plug on its most advanced models worldwide.
Anthropic received the directive on June 12 at 5:21 p.m. ET, commanding the company to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for all foreign nationals. The kicker: the order extends even to Anthropic’s own US-based employees who hold foreign citizenship, thanks to something called “deemed export” rules. In English: if you’re a non-US citizen working at Anthropic’s San Francisco office, you can’t touch the models either.
Anthropic complied immediately, disabling access to both models globally. The models had been live for exactly three days, having launched on June 9.
Why the government stepped in
The stated justification is national security. The directive reportedly traces back to a jailbreak demonstration that exposed vulnerabilities in Anthropic’s models, with the exploited capabilities said to be comparable to functions found in other frontier models like OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.
