The US government on Friday ordered Anthropic to immediately shut off access to its two most powerful AI models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5. The directive forces the company to disable both models for all users worldwide.
Anthropic's most capable AI model, Mythos, was kept tightly restricted due to its exceptional ability to find security vulnerabilities in software. Fable 5, released just three days ago, was a version of Mythos fitted with guardrails that block responses in high-risk areas.
The government's directive is framed as an export control action, but Anthropic says the underlying concern is a claimed jailbreak of Fable 5. The company argues that its strongest safeguards operate through independent classifier systems, and that the government's standard would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers if applied across the industry.
The shutdown could disrupt Anthropic's business, which has staked much of its public identity on being the safety-conscious alternative to its rivals. The company is widely expected to pursue an IPO this year, and the irony isn't lost on observers that its caution in restricting Mythos has now attracted government scrutiny
