Trump Shutdown Disrupts Anthropic’s Fable 5 System
Anthropic launched Fable 5 earlier this week as its most capable model yet. By Friday evening, the model was removed. The US Commerce Department issued a directive ordering Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals. It cited national security concerns.
Anthropic received the letter at 5:21 pm ET on Friday. It disabled both models within hours to comply and ensure full adherence to the order.
The Anthropic Fable 5 Mythos 5 Trump shutdown represents the most aggressive US government intervention in commercial AI deployment on record.
The directive, described by Bloomberg as “unprecedented,†requires Anthropic to get a license for the export, re-export, or domestic transfer of both models. It also blocks access by any foreign national, even if they are inside the United States. That restriction means some of Anthropic’s foreign employees cannot access the systems.
The government says the action stems from a discovered jailbreak technique targeting Fable 5. Anthropic reviewed the method and said it involved minor flaws also present in other public models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.
Anthropic rejected the order. The company said a “narrow potential jailbreak†should not trigger a recall of a model used by hundreds of millions of people. It warned that such a standard could slow or stop new AI releases across the industry. It also confirmed that smaller Claude models, including Claude Opus 4.8, were not affected. Anthropic believes the move is a misunderstanding and is working to restore access.
The shutdown comes as Anthropic prepares for a public market debut after filing confidentially for an IPO, with a valuation of around $965 billion. Analysts say the directive raises new questions about whether frontier AI models will face export-control-style regulation instead of standard product rollout rules.
