GoKawiilAnthropic has suspended access to its two most capable AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for all users worldwide after the US government issued an export control directive ordering the company to block access by any foreign national.
US Gov: bar 'foreign national' access to Fable 5
The directive, which Anthropic says it received at 5:21pm ET on June 12, cites "national security" authorities and bars access to both models by foreign nationals inside or outside the United States, including Anthropic's own foreign-national employees.
The order's net effect, the company says, is that it must disable both models for all customers to comply. All other Anthropic models, including Claude Opus 4.8, are unaffected.
The timing is awkward. Anthropic began rolling out Fable 5 on June 9, free to all Pro, Max, and Enterprise customers through June 22. The model handed to millions for free three days ago is now offline for everyone.
Claude Fable 5 'currently unavailable' (BleepingComputer)
Fable 5 is the safeguarded sibling of Mythos 5. Both share the same underlying model, but Fable adds the safeguards.
Fable blocks or diverts sensitive cybersecurity, biology, and chemistry queries, while the unrestricted Mythos 5 goes only to vetted government cyberdefenders and life sciences partners.
In a developer notice, Anthropic said new sessions would fall back to a user's default model or Opus 4.8, existing Fable 5 sessions would end with an error, and Platform requests to Fable 5 would also fail. It told integrators to migrate to other models.
UK's Minister for AI and Online Safety, Kanishka Narayan MP, said the pause affected customers in both the US and UK, framing it as a case for technological sovereignty and pointing to the government's £1.1bn AI chip investment.
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