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U.S. Orders Anthropic to Suspend Foreign Access to Mythos 5 and Fable 5; Company Disables Models Worldwide
The Commerce Department directive requires licenses for any export, re-export, or domestic transfer of the models. Anthropic responded by disabling access for all users worldwide.
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U.S. government ordered Anthropic on Friday, June 12, 2026, to suspend access to its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 AI models for all foreign nationals. The Commerce Department issued an export-control directive that requires the company to obtain a license before any export, re-export, or domestic transfer of the models.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei notifying the company of the restrictions. The directive also applies to foreign nationals employed by Anthropic. The government cited national security concerns but did not provide specific details.
It notified Anthropic on Friday that it had become aware of a method of jailbreaking Fable 5. Anthropic stated it received only verbal notice of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak. The company said it reviewed a demonstration of the technique and determined it identified only a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities that other publicly available models can discover without a bypass.
Anthropic stated it has instituted safeguards for its newest models to greatly reduce the likelihood they are misused for cybersecurity-related tasks. The company said the government plans to red-team Fable 5's safeguards. Anthropic stated no model is completely resistant to any jailbreak.
It said it disagrees that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. “If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers,” Anthropic said. Anthropic released Fable 5 last week as a version of Mythos safe for general use.
The company claimed at launch that Fable 5's capabilities exceed those of any model it has ever made generally available. Anthropic acknowledged in its June 9, 2026 release statement that releasing a model this capable comes with risks. Anthropic stated without safeguards, Fable 5's capabilities in areas like cybersecurity could be misused to cause serious damage.
