U.S. Gov't Orders Anthropic to Disable its Newest AI Models and Restrict Foreigner Use
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
An alleged jailbreak triggered a national security directive that forced the model to be pulled:
Anthropic disabled its two most capable AI models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, for every customer worldwide on Friday [12 June 2026], after the U.S. government issued an export control directive barring access by any foreign national, according to a statement the company published that evening. Rather conveniently, the order landed at 5:21 pm ET, three days after the models launched, and because it covers foreign nationals both inside and outside the United States, including Anthropic's own employees, the company said selective compliance was impossible and pulled both models globally.
The Trump administration's directive specifically targets Mythos-class models, which include Fable 5. Anthropic had released the pair on Tuesday, putting the latter into general availability while keeping the unrestricted Mythos 5 limited to partners in its Project Glasswing security program. Both descend from the same Mythos Preview model that Anthropic first announced in April.
Anthropic said the letter gave no specifics, and that the government has so far supplied only verbal evidence pointing to a narrow, non-universal jailbreak. The technique consists of asking the model to read a codebase and identify software flaws, a task the company said other public models perform without any bypass. It named OpenAI's GPT-5.5 as one model offering comparable capability.
"We believe this is a misunderstanding," the company wrote, adding that it's complying with the order while working to restore access. Anthropic also argued that recalling a model deployed to hundreds of millions of users over a single narrow vulnerability, if applied as an industry standard, would halt frontier model launches across the sector.
According to Axios, an administration official" told the publication that the Commerce Department acted after another company claimed it was able to jailbreak Mythos, alarming the administration about possible national security risks." Mythos is understood to currently be in use by the NSA for offensive cyber operations.
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