On June 12, 2026, Anthropic said the US government had issued an export control directive, citing national security authorities, requiring the company to suspend all access to its two most capable models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including the company’s own foreign-national employees. Anthropic stated it received the directive at 5:21pm Eastern that day.
Because Anthropic could not selectively block only foreign nationals across its customer base, the practical effect was that it had to abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all customers in order to comply. The company said its other models were unaffected. According to Anthropic, the government’s stated concern was that it had become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking,” Fable 5.
Anthropic complied but publicly disputed the action. The company said it had reviewed a demonstration of the technique, which it characterized as surfacing a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities that were readily discoverable using other publicly available models. Anthropic argued that treating a narrow potential jailbreak as cause for recalling a commercial model used by hundreds of millions of people would, if applied as a general standard, halt new frontier model deployments across the industry. The episode is an early test of how the federal government’s national-security and export-control powers can be used to pull a deployed frontier AI model from the market.