Until last week, about 200 organisations could use a preview of Anthropic’s most capable model, Mythos. They got in through a programme called Glasswing, after the system flagged thousands of software vulnerabilities. Then, on the evening of 12 June, the US Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to cut off every foreign national, anywhere.

The company could not separate them from everyone else in real time. So it pulled Mythos and its sibling Fable 5 offline for every user on Earth. Fable 5 had spent three days topping every major benchmark.

By Friday, a few early testers still kept preview access, among them the security firms Dragos and Cisco. Days earlier, Europe’s cybersecurity agency, ENISA, had joined Glasswing. The order pushed it back out.

It is a small, strange detail. It also holds the whole AI economy in miniature. The technology is valuable enough that customers cling to back-channel access. It is sensitive enough that a government will reach into a private firm’s servers and switch it off.

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