Anthropic said it received a US government export control directive on June 12, 2026 at 5:21pm ET ordering it to suspend all access to its two most capable models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for any foreign national. To comply, the company is disabling both models for every customer, not only overseas users. Access to all of Anthropic's other models is unaffected.
The order, which Anthropic says cites national security authorities, applies to "any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees." Because the company cannot reliably separate foreign nationals from the rest of its user base in real time, the practical result is a hard shutoff of Fable 5 and Mythos 5 worldwide.
In our directory
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems, best known for the Claude family of models.
- Founded
- 2021
- Location
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Valuation
- Private / $100B+ est
What the directive covers
- Who is blocked: every foreign national, inside or outside the US, including Anthropic's own foreign-national staff.
- Net effect: Fable 5 and Mythos 5 go dark for all customers while Anthropic ensures compliance.
- What stays up: all other Anthropic models keep running normally.
Why the government acted
According to reporting from Axios and CNBC, the Commerce Department moved after another company claimed it had found a way to "jailbreak" Mythos, raising concern inside the administration about national security risk. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei informing the company that Fable 5 and Mythos 5 would be subject to export controls. The letter did not spell out the specific national security concern.
Anthropic disputes the basis
In its public statement, Anthropic said it is complying with the legal directive while disagreeing with the rationale. The company said the government has so far provided only verbal evidence of a "narrow, non-universal jailbreak" that involves asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix software flaws. Anthropic argues that the capability in question is widely available from other models, including OpenAI's GPT-5.5, and that a narrow potential jailbreak should not justify recalling a commercial product already deployed to hundreds of millions of people. It called the situation a likely misunderstanding and said it is working to restore access.
Why it matters
This is one of the first times Washington has aimed export controls at a deployed commercial AI model rather than at chips or hardware. For years the export-control fight centered on advanced semiconductors. Extending that regime to a live software model sets a precedent that could reshape how frontier labs ship products, who they are allowed to serve, and where their engineers can be based.