Anthropic’s technical staff have been sitting down with US government officials every single day since June 16 to resolve a standoff that saw the company’s most powerful AI models yanked from global access almost overnight.
The trigger: a Commerce Department directive issued on June 12 ordering Anthropic to disable access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals, citing national security risks tied to potential jailbreak vulnerabilities that could enable cyberattacks. By June 13, the models were dark.
How we got here
The roots of this conflict stretch back months. In February 2026, the Trump administration instructed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s products entirely, a move tied to disputes over military applications of the company’s technology.
Then came the executive order on June 2. President Trump signed a framework establishing a voluntary review process for national security evaluation of frontier AI models. Ten days later, the Commerce Department’s directive to Anthropic felt decidedly less optional.
