The US Government Switched Off Anthropic's Most Powerful AI for the Entire World
The United States government has ordered a private American company to switch off its most advanced product for almost everyone on the planet — and the company complied within hours. On Friday 12 June 2026, Anthropic disabled access to its two most powerful AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, to comply with an export-control directive from the US government. In the company’s own words, the order required it to “suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.” There was no way to honour that while keeping the models live for anyone, so Anthropic pulled them for every customer worldwide. It is worth slowing down on what actually happened here, because it is far bigger than a product outage. A government reached into...
Christian Findlay
Jun 13, 2026
