The Trump administration dropped an export control hammer on Anthropic this week, issuing a directive that restricts access to the company’s latest AI models exclusively to US nationals. The order, issued on June 12-13, forced Anthropic to disable global access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models within hours.
For a company valued at over $900 billion, that’s not a small inconvenience. It’s a geopolitical statement wrapped in a compliance mandate.
What happened and why it matters
The directive centers on national security concerns, specifically around jailbreak vulnerabilities discovered in Fable 5. Amazon researchers reportedly identified flaws that could allow bad actors to circumvent the model’s safety protocols, essentially tricking the AI into ignoring its own guardrails.
Fable 5 had only been publicly released around June 9-10, days before the government pulled the plug on international access. Mythos 5, positioned as Anthropic’s next-generation model, got swept up in the same directive.
