On June 12, 2026, Anthropic published a statement saying the US government, citing national security authorities, had issued an export control directive requiring it to suspend all access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models by any foreign national - whether inside or outside the United States, and including foreign-national Anthropic employees. To comply, Anthropic disabled access to both models for all customers; access to its other models was unaffected.
The action followed the June 2, 2026 executive order that set up a federal process for vetting the most advanced AI models before release. It marked one of the first concrete instances of the US government gating a frontier model release under that new regime, treating cutting-edge model access as a controlled export.
The episode shows the practical edge of the emerging national-security approach to frontier AI: rather than an open launch, access to the most capable models can now be narrowed by government directive, with compliance landing on the developer overnight.