The US government just forced Anthropic to shut down its two most powerful AI models.
Citing national security, the government issued an export control directive ordering Anthropic to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every user, including foreign national employees within Anthropic itself.
The directive arrived at 5:21pm ET today. No specific details of the national security concern were provided.
Anthropic says the government's concern appears to be a method of bypassing or "jailbreaking" Fable 5. After reviewing the technique, Anthropic says the vulnerabilities it exposes are minor, previously known, and widely available from other models, including OpenAI's GPT-5.5.
Anthropic is complying but pushing back publicly: "We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry, it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers."
The model was live for less than 24 hours. Thousands of hours of red-teaming by the US government, UK AISI, and private third parties before launch. No universal jailbreak was ever found. Anthropic says it believes this is a misunderstanding and is working to restore access.
This sets a precedent. The US government just demonstrated it can pull an AI model off the market with a single directive, no transparency, no statutory process, and no public evidence.
Whether or not the concern is valid, the power to do this exists and it was just used.
