Anthropic Restores Foreign Access to Fable 5 After White House Cut Last Month

Anthropic restored access to its Fable 5 model for foreign users after the White House directed the company to block such access last month, Insider reported. Sean McDonnell, a 43-year-old founder of the web design company Kaizen and the SaaS site Consigns, was working on a task with the model in England when the restriction took effect.

He said he had already prepared backup plans that prevented major disruption to his small team’s work.

General access has since been restored, and McDonnell’s team is using Fable 5 again. After the reinstatement, the team saved the full codebase as a Claude Skill so other models could reference it if access is lost. Before the cutoff, McDonnell had asked Fable to create a guide that Claude and other AI models could follow.

When access ended, remaining tasks were shifted to Codex and Claude 4.8. McDonnell said the episode showed the value of maintaining documentation and contingency plans rather than depending entirely on any single AI tool. He noted that clearer advance notice from the company would have helped, though he understood possible security reasons for the abrupt change.