US orders Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals

In an unprecedented move, the US government issued an export-control directive ordering Anthropic to suspend access to its newly launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, explicitly including Anthropic's own foreign-national employees. Anthropic confirmed the directive on X, noting the 'net effect' touches hundreds of millions of users, and said it publicly disagreed, asserting Fable 5 had undergone extensive safety testing and questioning the basis for restricting broadly used software.

Mechanically, because Anthropic cannot verify the nationality of every user, the company chose to disable access broadly rather than attempt selective enforcement — r/cybersecurity noted it effectively turned off access for everyone. The directive followed Anthropic's own months-long marketing of Mythos as so dangerous it required gated access, which critics argue set the legal predicate. Reuters separately reported that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had raised concerns about the models before the crackdown.

Reaction was sharp and cynical. Developers on r/developersIndia called the underlying jailbreak 'extremely minor, revealing issues other models like GPT-5.5 identify without exploit.' Sam Altman quipped it was 'incredible marketing to say we have built a bomb.' Yann LeCun compared it to 1990s export controls on computers above 1 GFLOPS that the PlayStation 2 rendered absurd. The episode crystallizes a new phase in which geopolitics — not just capability — gates frontier model access, and raises hard questions for every multinational enterprise that had begun standardizing on Claude.