U.S. Orders Anthropic to Suspend Mythos 5 and Fable 5 AI Models and Ends All Government Contracts

U.S. Department of Commerce ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 artificial intelligence models on Friday evening, June 13 2026, citing national security reasons. Anthropic, based in San Francisco, said the directive applied only to foreign nationals but that the company could not distinguish users by nationality, forcing it to take both models offline.

Mythos 5 had been unrestricted and limited to a small number of partners. Fable 5 carried heavy protections against misuse for cyberattacks or the development of chemical and biological weapons. An unnamed organization told the Trump administration it had found a way to bypass Fable 5 safeguards for cyberattacks.

Anthropic described the loophole as narrow and the exposed vulnerabilities as minor. S. government has terminated all of its contracts with Anthropic. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated on Wednesday that policymakers should activate a slow and rickety policy apparatus to deal with risks and opportunities that are going to compound surprisingly quickly.

Entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky said the order's implications are enormous and that any startup making frontier models is now at the mercy of the government. S. efforts from behind.

Ben Murphy of the Institute for Progress said that in a functioning administration the government would have requested additional testing or safeguards rather than blindsiding the company. Mona Sloane, a professor at the University of Virginia, said AI's rapid acceleration and the concentration of influence in a few companies have caught governments off guard, making further model suspensions possible.

The pro-regulation group Americans for Responsible Innovation argued that decisions of this magnitude should not be made impulsively or subject to political favoritism.