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US Orders Anthropic to Pull Fable 5, Mythos 5

 

The US government issued an export control directive forcing Anthropic to disable its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models for all users worldwide.

 

 

Anthropic said in a statement published June 12, 2026, that it received an export control directive from the US government at 5:21 p.m. ET, citing national security authorities and ordering the suspension of all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether located inside or outside the United States, including the company's own foreign-national employees.

 

Anthropic said the directive's practical effect required it to disable both models for every customer to ensure compliance, while access to all other Anthropic models remained unaffected. According to NBC News reporter Jared Perlo, Claude's landing page displayed a notice stating that "Fable 5 is temporarily unavailable" following the shutdown.

 

Anthropic said the directive did not provide specific details of the government's national security concern, but the company's understanding was that officials had become aware of a method for bypassing, or "jailbreaking," Fable 5's safeguards. The directive was reportedly sent from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and drafted with assistance from officials at the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security.

 

Anthropic Disputes Severity of Jailbreak Finding

 

Anthropic said it reviewed a demonstration of the technique and found it had been used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities, which the company said other publicly available models can also discover without requiring any bypass. The company stated that the government had so far provided only verbal evidence of a narrow, non-universal jailbreak that involved asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix software flaws, and that this capability is also available from other models, including OpenAI's GPT-5.5. Anthropic said it disagreed that a narrow potential jailbreak should justify recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of users, and described the action as based on what it called a misunderstanding.

 

In its statement, Anthropic outlined its safeguard strategy for Fable 5, saying the model had been red-teamed for thousands of hours with the US government, the UK AI Safety Institute, and third-party organizations prior to launch, and that no tester had found a universal jailbreak. The company said it had adopted a 30-day data retention policy for Mythos-class models specifically to support jailbreak research and mitigation.

 

Models Launched Days Before Suspension

 

Anthropic released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on Tuesday, June 9, 2026, describing them as the most capable AI systems the company had produced. Fable 5 was made publicly available with stronger restrictions on cybersecurity- and biology-related queries, while Mythos 5 was released without those safeguards to a select group of partners, including cybersecurity and infrastructure companies. The Financial Times had previously disclosed that the National Security Agency was using Mythos to conduct offensive cyberattacks.

 

Directive Follows Period of Federal Tension

 

Reports suggest that the suspension follows a dispute earlier in 2026, when President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved in February to restrict Anthropic's products from federal agencies after the company sought additional guardrails on Pentagon use of its technology, with Trump criticizing the company in a post on Truth Social.

 

Anthropic subsequently sued the administration over the matter, and that a federal judge in California ruled in Anthropic's favor, though the case remains active in a Washington, D.C. federal court. 

 

Anthropic said it believes the government should retain the authority to block unsafe deployments through a transparent, statutory process grounded in technical facts, but stated that the directive issued June 12 did not adhere to those principles. The company said it was complying with the order while working to restore access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5.