Washington Pulled the Plug on Anthropic ‘s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. The Rest of the World Is Watching.
Publish Date: 2026-06-13 11:22:00
Source Domain: securityaffairs.com
Washington Pulled the Plug on Anthropic ‘s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. The Rest of the World Is Watching.
Pierluigi Paganini
June 13, 2026
Anthropic disputes restrictions on Mythos 5 and Fable 5, arguing the decision lacks transparency and isn’t based on clear technical evidence.
On Friday June 12 at 5:21pm ET, Anthropic received a letter from the US Commerce Department, signed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and drafted with officials from the Bureau of Industry and Security.
The directive was blunt: suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, anywhere in the world, including foreign national Anthropic employees. Because Anthropic cannot reliably distinguish foreign nationals from other users in real time, it did the only thing it could do: it disabled both models for everyone.
The company filed a confidential IPO prospectus earlier this month disclosing a $47 billion revenue run rate and a $965 billion valuation. The timing is, at minimum, inconvenient.
“The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.” reads the statement published by Anthropic. “The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.”
The letter provided no specific national security rationale. Anthropic says it pieced together the reason from verbal communications: the government believes someone demonstrated a jailbreak technique against Fable 5.
Anthropic reviewed what it believes is the report that triggered the directive and pushed back hard on the premise. The alleged jailbreak is narrow and non-universal: essentially…
