The US Department of Commerce ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 AI models on June 12, just three days after both went live. The directive applies to all foreign nationals, including Anthropic’s own employees, effectively killing public and enterprise access in one swift move.
What happened and why it matters
Anthropic launched both models on June 9 as part of its latest generation of frontier AI systems. Mythos 5, the more powerful of the two, sits at the center of Anthropic’s Project Glasswing, a collaborative effort involving AWS, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike. The model has demonstrated autonomous vulnerability discovery capabilities, which is a polite way of saying it can find security holes in software without human guidance.
The problem that apparently spooked regulators involves a jailbreak vulnerability in Fable 5. Exploiting it could reportedly unlock the unrestricted capabilities of Mythos 5.
The export control directive was reportedly influenced by discussions at the White House level, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy among those flagging concerns. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic and provides cloud infrastructure through AWS.
