← Back

US Gov just killed Fable (for now)

There’s a decent chance the model currently helping me fix a bug just got switched off.

This evening, at 22:21 BST (5:21pm ET), the US government handed Anthropic an export control directive. Not a fine, not a warning. An order. The net effect, in Anthropic’s own words, is that they “must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.”1

We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.

So why? There are two honest answers and I genuinely can’t tell you which is true.

The charitable one: the government actually believes Fable can do something dangerous, moved fast, and the messy execution is just what fast looks like.

The cynical one has a five-month head start. Back in February, after Anthropic refused Pentagon demands to strip out safeguards against autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, Trump ordered federal agencies to drop the company and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth branded it a “supply chain risk”,2 a label previously reserved for foreign adversaries and never before pinned on an American firm. Anthropic sued. In March a judge blocked the designation, describing it as an attempt to “punish” the company.3 Then in April an appeals court let the blacklisting stand.4 That is the backdrop against which a brand-new national security authority appears, aimed squarely at Anthropic’s flagship, and works instantly where the older fight has dragged through the courts for months.

The question I keep circling is the one Anthropic raised itself. If the capability is “widely available from other models”, and the directive touches only Anthropic’s, then either the order is underinclusive or it was never really about the capability.

This is really wild. I still seem to have access, so my bug fix is still ongoing… but we truly do live in interesting times.

Note: At 02:33 BST (18:33 PDT) it looks like Anthropic has reset users’ usage limits.

Update, 03:01 BST: And there it goes. Mid bug fix, the model vanished out from under me: “There’s an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.” The lag has closed. The kill switch reached me.

Footnotes

  1. Anthropic, Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, 2026. Link ↩

  2. Reuters, Trump orders US govt to cut ties with Anthropic; Hegseth declares supply chain ‘risk’, 2026. Link ↩

  3. CNN Business, Judge blocks Pentagon’s effort to ‘punish’ Anthropic by labeling it a supply chain risk, 2026. Link ↩

  4. CNBC, Anthropic loses appeals court bid to temporarily block Pentagon blacklisting, 2026. Link ↩