Anthropic Disables Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI Models Globally After US Government Export Control Order

The US Commerce Department, reportedly acting through a letter signed by Secretary Howard Lutnick, issued an unprecedented export control directive on Friday ordering Anthropic to immediately suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models for all foreign nationals, including Anthropic's own foreign-national employees. To ensure compliance, Anthropic disabled the models entirely for all users worldwide. Fable 5 had been publicly released just three days earlier as a restricted version of Mythos 5, a more powerful model Anthropic had withheld from general release due to its exceptional ability to identify software vulnerabilities. The government's concern centers on a reported jailbreak method that could allow the models to assist with hacking, but Anthropic says it has reviewed the technique and disputes its severity, arguing it represents a narrow, non-universal vulnerability also present in rival models such as OpenAI's GPT-5.5. Anthropic stated it disagrees that a narrow jailbreak should trigger the recall of a model deployed to hundreds of millions of users, warning that applying such a standard industry-wide would effectively halt all frontier model deployments. The action deepens an existing rift between Anthropic and the Trump administration, which earlier placed the company on a Pentagon supply chain blacklist after Anthropic refused to allow its models to be used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems. Anthropic said it believes the shutdown reflects a misunderstanding and is working to restore access as quickly as possible.