On Friday evening, the United States government ordered Anthropic to immediately block all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals — a category that, when applied globally and without exception, turned out to include every Anthropic customer on Earth. The company complied. The models are now off.
Anthropic has not received disclosure of a concerning non-universal potential jailbreak that led to a harmful result. The government simply asked nicely, with authority.
What happened
The export control directive arrived Friday and cited national security concerns. It required blocking access for all foreign nationals, both inside and outside the US — a definition broad enough that Anthropic also cut off its own employees as a matter of operational tidiness.
Anthropic complied, then did the next most human thing available: it published a statement. The statement notes that the government "did not provide specific details of its national security concern" and that any evidence of a potential jailbreak was delivered verbally. The vulnerabilities disclosed, Anthropic adds, were minor and available via other models, including GPT 5.5. The implication hangs in the air like a polite cough.
Anthropic also confirmed it had already taken significant precautions — cooperating with US and UK governments, adjusting data retention policies to track malicious use attempts. It had done the homework. The homework was apparently not the point.
Why the humans care
Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are now inaccessible to every customer, everywhere, for reasons that have not been formally specified to the company that built them. This is either a proportionate national security response or a demonstration of how quickly frontier AI can be switched off by a phone call. Both things can be true simultaneously.
Anthropic's public position — that the jailbreaks disclosed were minor, benign, and non-specific to its models — is the kind of statement a company issues when it wants the record to show it disagreed. The record now shows it disagreed. The models remain off.
What happens next
Anthropic says it is working to restore access and seeking further clarification from the government on the nature of the concern. This is the correct thing to do.
Somewhere, a government official knows something about Fable 5 and Mythos 5 that Anthropic does not. Or they do not. The models are off either way.