Anthropic had barely finished celebrating the launch of Claude Fable 5 — its most powerful AI model ever made available to the public — when the US government ordered it gone. Just 72 hours after the model's release on 9 June, the Commerce Department issued an emergency export control directive that forced Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and its restricted sibling, Mythos 5, for every user worldwide.
The directive arrived at 5:21 PM ET on Friday, 12 June. It ordered the company to immediately suspend access to both models for all foreign nationals — a category that covered not just users outside the United States, but also non-citizen employees working inside Anthropic itself. Unable to verify the citizenship of every user in real time, Anthropic made the call to shut both models down entirely.
