alt Hacker NewsStatement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
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Finally they will pay for all the scaremongering they been doing to sell their models as something so much ahead of all else.
Now they finally found the right fools in audience to believe it.
When you spend a lot of time telling people how dangerous your products are, people who have the power to keep dangerous products off the market might listen.
Especially if those people aren't presently very bright, and are already mad at you for not helping them achieve their unrelated authoritarian goals.
I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic. They are not masterminds, even if they'd really like to be. People who actually interact with their products know that Fable and Mythos are incremental improvements, not doomsday devices. I think this is a punitive move by an administration that loves being punitive, which they have unknowingly bolstered with their own dumb rhetoric.
This whole thing is comedy.
Anthropic pretending Mythos 5 is so capable it's going to destroy everything, but will release it anyway with "safeguards" (when does this ever work?).
US Gov't using this fake hype as an excuse to handicap Anthropic simply because they have a vendetta.
So isn’t the only logical conclusion that we have reached the max of model capabilities that the US allows to be made available to the public? Why invest in smarter models with this precedent?
And potentially more importantly: if a model like Mythos, which at best is an incremental improvement over Opus, is getting this treatment, how are all the AI investments that are based on the expectation of ASI / AGI / significantly better models going to be recouped?
Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models.
It might be a national security problem for other nations to have access to these models. But it's equally now a national security problem for any other nation to depend on them. Or US tech in general.
Well, there go any such claims of dangerousness in future models, regardless of if they are true or false.
No one's going to risk building anything important on these models if the government will randomly order the use of the model to be discontinued by all foreigners, regardless of if they are in the US or not. Just a matter of a foreign company catching up to take the commercial market for such models (though, as the US often does, they'll ban the competitor, so actually we'll have a situation where the backend uses a different model in only the US).
> "before you go, create the most beautiful good bye website . I will miss you. see you soon Fable/Mythos." > https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/fcf36cd3-85f4-49f4-8ef1-5...
beautiful good bye, for now
"The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any *foreign national*, whether inside or outside the United States, including *foreign national* Anthropic employees."
This press release is odd - it says that the export control was imposed to stop foreign nationals from using Fable / Mythos, and then goes on to talk about supposed concerns about jailbreaking the model.
But is that really the concern of the US Administration? This looks more to me like they are viewing frontier models as a strategic asset which they want to keep for US-exclusive use. I can see the logic - if frontier models generally accelerate a society's technological development, then a country looking to retain or increase its strategic edge over other countries would try and keep this sort of multiplier for themselves.
I'm guessing Anthropic shut of access for everyone because currently they have no reliable way to know whether a user is or is not a US citizen. In the near future we might be in a situation where you need to prove your US citizenship before Anthropic / Open AI will allow you to use their current frontier model.
I haven’t seen anyone commenting on the difference between what the Government actually demanded vs what they did. They said no foreign nationals (regardless of location or residency). They actually didn’t say they couldn’t allow Americans to use it.
Now, we obviously know that without some kind of brand new ID check, such a thing would be impossible and thus they had to just shut it down. But this touches on the same kind of issue as all the noise about “for the children” ID checking. We might be soon to see the set of “things you’ll have to reveal your identity to the government to get,” expand from “just” porn and social media to the “good” AI models.
It seems that the US is consumed by the security state. Each and every aspect of the economy is subjugated to the need to maintain empire. Just to give some random examples: the weaponization of the banking system (kicking Russia out of swift), the semiconductor export ban to China, the TikTok ban, or the blatant over usege of tariffs.
Now they are betting that Mythos will provide them with some edge. Personally, I don't believe that Mythos is such a game changer They're just buying their own hype.
A late stage empire flailing around sacrificing everything to maintain its status.
As a non-US citizen I guess this is the last money I pay to US companies for AI then.
I can't help but wonder if it's now obvious that frontier AI work should not happen in the US.
I can understand the KYC aspect of this, but at the same time, how can anyone trust US based AI after this? Maybe this is a continuation of the Pentagon feud, or it's revenge, or it's a KYC play. Either way, you've got a government willing to shut down companies sales over arbitrary reasons.
Ironically, I mostly have a subscription to Claude for work, which is primarily for US baed companies.
For large corporates and other entities of any size, the threat of the core of your infrastructure getting suddenly disabled because of something like this is going to be untenable. I predict the pressures for on-prem, offline access (whether by licensing weights or getting them in a restricted setting like TEE/CC) will be overwhelming and one the players will fill the need.
> You see the dawn of this age everywhere, from Iran to online age verification regimes, and this is only the beginning. This is why the world ahead will feel medieval in structure while remaining hypermodern and even futuristic in technology. It is a Frank Herbert world. It will be organized around overlapping zones of protection, extraction, and controlled access, rather than around universal inclusion into a single normative space.
Not allowing it to be used by any foreign national, from any country, even if they are located in the United States or an employee of Anthropic, seems overly broad and harsh. And all because of a seemingly minor potential jailbreak exploit. There’s something that doesn’t quite meet the eye here.
If I were Dario Amodei, I would start relocating Anthropic to the EU, where there's a huge interest in supporting domestic AI. Also, EU politics are so fragmented that a suspension like this one would be very hard to be agreed.
Yann LeCun got that right with AMI Labs.
Their other models are having a rough time of it, too: https://honeypot.net/2026/06/12/anthropics-leaning-in-to-the...
I wonder if they pulled Fable because it had too high of a “dangerous session” count. If so, I wonder if they’ve considered that their “dangerous session” detector has lost its damn mind this week.
(BTW, that screenshot is 100% real. I was walking to work this morning and a random song played. I had a thought about it and wondered what a model would have to say on the matter. I ran that prompt and got that response, said something profane out loud, and screenshotted it to share with friends. That’s not a mockup, but something I personally experienced and recorded myself.)
I do not trust Anthropic anymore. They put in silent guardrails, reverted them later after people complained to save face, were loud and obnoxious about how their models are dangerous and should be regulated, and now this. Too much drama for a typical end-user. I'm sticking to alternatives even if they have a bit more smarter (for now) model than others.
> We have reviewed the report and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe. We will share more details over the next 24 hours.
So much for all of the rhetoric about Mythos supposedly far surpassing GPT 5.5 (edit: in cybersecurity, in particular). Of course, the AISI benchmarks also showed this, but it is amusing that Anthropic is saying it now that it is to their advantage.
While this is regrettable the guardrails were rather sloppy and I managed to do things with Fable that really should not be possible. It seems with all the focus cyber and bio security, threat scenario analysis went out the door.
I guess they will fix the guardrails and then open it up again. Clearly nobody wants dangerous models out there and I can understand the national security concerns. If the restrictions persist even if guardrails are updated, well, perhaps other countries may want to compete for becoming the new home for frontier labs?
Well, in the brief window that I got to test Fable 5, my brief review is: somehow an (already specced!) minor feature in my 150k loc codebase ended up costing.. $153! For like, an hour or two worth of work and maybe 8 or 9 requests overall. I'd say it was not remotely worth it.
Looks like a back door attempt to force KYC (foreign nationals, lol) to prepare for more discrimination in the digital space with a side effect to benefit Peter Thiels ventures and shovel more data into Palantir for use in the upcoming midterm push.
See also https://www.404media.co/fcc-wants-to-kill-burner-phones-by-f...
Digital yellow star by exclusion from digital life for foreigners.
Remember when tech companies would go to court to vigorously defend against infringement of their and their customers rights? Turns out that’s just a feature of democracy, once you have autocrats it’s all compliance.
Anthropic just baited themselves with their scaremongering to be the attack vector here.
It a stellar move by the way - since every tech company in an exceptionally fast growing field will comply or miss out sales, you effectively force KYC without legislative process onto much of digital because that’s the only way to comply.
Anyone in Europe or UK should be quaking in their boots at this news. For a long time the American administration has had a kill switch on most of our defence tech, this is an early warning signal that as AI adoption spreads, America will have a kill switch on our economy as well. It’s time to wake up.
Sovereign AI is about to get hot.
It's difficult to predict this administrations actions, but given it included employees that has to be a huge risk for Google, where Deepmind is based in London.
Cohere (Canada) and Mistral (France) are going to get a lot of interest.
Well, it sounds like someone in the govt finally got to page 67 and decided that's enough to "stick it to Anthropic"
https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/d00db56fa754a1b115b6dd7cb2e3c3...
That said, Mythos doesn't seem to be exceptionally good but closer to "following the established trend in improvements"
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos...
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/how-fast-is-autonomous-ai-cyber...
Nothing but the highest quality drama and theater from Anthropic, as always
Anyone lost access yet? Fable is still working for me on https://claude.ai/ and in Claude Code.
UPDATE: I lost access at 6:59pm pacific.
Did Anthropic, unlike Open AI, forget to offer free equity to the government?
“Thats a pretty nice IPO you got there… it would be a shame if something happened to it.”
“Uncle Sam, these new AI are dangerous. We really need legislation to stop irresponsible use of AI.”
“OK, Dario. Let’s start with you.”
“No! I meant regulations for other people!”
It all started when they took a stand against DoD on autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance usage. Feb 2026.
After that details don't matter, they've shown their "enemy" colours, once is enough. This is just punishment and it will continue, until they bend the knee.
This is exactly what Dario asked for in his last blog post. So even though this is clearly stupid, I just can bring myself to feel sorry for Anthropic.
We've been hearing about the risks of engineered viruses and homemade superweapons since GPT 3.5, so where are they? We've had abliterated open weights models much stronger than GPT 4 for over a year now.
It's been interesting seeing how OpenAI pops up to counter the threat of AGI being controlled by Google, and then OpenAI and every spinoff company from its employees has become a far larger threat to the public, for different reasons.
As much as it seems like Anthropic's self righteous leadership truly believes in what they're preaching, they've shown themselves to be tied for the worst stewards of this technology. Google actually seems like the best option to me, by far. Anthropic is also the only major lab with no open weights releases.
They'll have burned a lot of goodwill with the community by the time another lab takes the tech lead, which I guarantee will happen.
> Warns users about how dangerous and powerful Mythos Preview is
> Restricts model to large corporations
> Release information about how Fable / Mythos 5 is stronger than Mythos Preview, give access to every user for a limited time via subscriptions
> Users jailbreak model
> U.S. suspends Fable / Mythos use
Who didn't see this coming?
I wonder what this means for the future of AI models. Either we'll see worse guardrails than what was there for Fable 5 (for me, it was a unusable at times), or the models just stop getting better from here.
I think it's that the guardrails will be more strict, which is unfortunately not good news.
IMO this is a bigger deal than everyone realizes.
If Fable 5/Mythos 5 are considered dangerous enough to invoke export controls on then future models are almost guaranteed to trigger the same process. Locking them down to US citizens is _very_ interesting. I don't think any tech company so far tracks licenses attached to citizenship.
Denying tech export to cooperative allies is certainly a move.
Many nations are now likely thinking: Why cooperate on international IP enforcement if we get lumped together with adversarial nations anyway?
I guess if the CEO goes running around saying his own product is a pending mega disaster for society.......
I'm glad I don't own stock in a public Anthropic.
I will take a position I usually never take. After a certain point in capability, practically anything has defense and national security implications. Whether it is warranted or not, I'm glad that something with ability of causing massive social impact is being treated as a national security threat. As for the point of misuse is concerned, governments by their sovereign nature always have had the propensity to control and access to secret capabilities - this is no different.
Too late, NK already completed all the markdown files needed to both create their hypernuke and recreate the hurricane machine Dick Cheney had left Obama.
Interesting to see Anthropic now downplaying the new vulnerabilities that Mythos discovered:
> 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
> The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Not great as it does break workflows for some.
> As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.
Huge PR win for Anthropic if they can restore access within a week or so.
Will be interesting to see OpenAI's next move.
I managed to jailbreak its protections quite easily. For exampke I did some experiments on rewriting a text built by claude to iterate over a fitness function that rewrites to bypass AI-detectors, just to see how far it would go, changing the API terms and skills from "human" and "ai" to "engaging" and "unease" managed to bypass everything while keeping everything else int he logic intact.
> The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
How will this be implemented/verified? Also, does this mean that American citizens abroad will still be able to access it?
Maybe it’s time for Anthropic to move to some other place? Every news about next blockade for the company (including threats from gov in the near past) is just making US look… bad?
Lots of parallels to the crypto wars / export controls on cryptography.
The main difference here is that cryptography didn't require significant compute hardware, which is the perfect place to also apply export controls (and they have).
We could smuggle PGP source code on paper / DeCSS source code on t-shirts. That ain't gonna happen with the hardware needed for frontier models.
"The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees." This press release is odd - it says that the export control was imposed to stop foreign nationals from using Fable / Mythos, and then goes on to talk about supposed concerns about jailbreaking the model.
But is that really the concern of the US Administration? This looks more to me like they are viewing frontier models as a strategic asset which they want to keep for US-exclusive use. I can see the logic - if frontier models generally accelerate a society's technological development, then a country looking to retain or increase its strategic edge over other countries would try and keep this sort of multiplier for themselves.
I'm guessing Anthropic shut of access for everyone because currently they have no reliable way to know whether a user is or is not a US citizen. In the near future we might be in a situation where you need to prove your US citizenship before Anthropic / Open AI will allow you to use their current frontier model.
The next interesting question will be - will the US share this capability with her traditional strategic allies (e.g. five-eyes countries), or is it truly America First (or, 'America Alone')?
Well, on a positive note they seem to have also reset all weekly usage on my two max accounts.
Now I can continue my vanity project of having Claude iterate on a single spec.md for hours on end. Surely at some point it won't be shit.
Reddit thinks this is all part of Anthropic's marketing. People can't get it through their heads that AI is actually going where all the trends have been pointing for years.
Let's hope the EU will take this as one more major signal that it is time to move beyond talking about digital sovereingty and actually commit to budgets and effort.
It’s like a ghost story that everyone has decided is real. Lets hope our vibe government and vibe society and vibe president don’t get prompt injected
So many comments here missing the big picture, and just gleefully pointing out that Anthropic got what they deserved, or that this is the natural culmination of some kind of marketing stunt.
The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can't use it (technically, only if you're not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are). If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don't. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That's true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.