Anthropic disabled access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 artificial intelligence models for all customers on June 12, 2026, after the US Commerce Department issued an export control directive citing national security concerns. The company said it received the directive at 5:21pm ET and is complying with the government's legal order, removing access to both models for all users. Anthropic said access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei stating that Fable 5 and Mythos 5 would be subject to export controls covering any location outside the United States and all foreign nationals within the country, including Anthropic's own foreign-national employees [Source: Axios]. Per the letter, a licence will be required for the export, re-export, or domestic transfer of those models. An administration official told Axios the Commerce Department decided to act after another company claimed it was able to jailbreak Mythos, and that the administration had previously tried to get Anthropic to pause releasing the models but was unsuccessful, prompting the export control letter.
Anthropic said the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or 'jailbreaking', Fable 5. However, the company said it received the directive without being given specific details of the national security concern. In its published statement, Anthropic said the government has provided only verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak that consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Anthropic said it disagrees that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people, adding that the demonstrated capability is widely available from other models including OpenAI's GPT-5.5. The company said it believes the situation is a misunderstanding and is working to restore access as soon as possible.
The directive arrives in the context of broader efforts by the Trump administration to tighten oversight of advanced AI systems. The administration released an executive order earlier in June 2026 to test the most advanced AI models before they are deployed, though that order is described as voluntary and explicitly avoids a licensing regime. Anthropic has a partnership with the Center for AI Standards and Innovation at the Commerce Department for pre-deployment testing. The export control letter represents a more forceful intervention, applying a licensing requirement that goes beyond the voluntary framework the administration had previously established.
Sources: Bloomberg, Wired, The Guardian, The Verge, Anthropic, Axios