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Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

2272 pointsby Dylan1312today at 12:51 AM1634 commentsview on HN

https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2065597942602531163


Comments

lionkortoday at 8:36 AM

It's a marketing stunt. If there's one thing we should have learned, it's that anthropic will do ANYTHING to get their product marketed as the biggest, most scary AI ever.

chmod775today at 2:00 AM

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.

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taurathtoday at 1:05 AM

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

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CompoundEyestoday at 1:15 AM

It says this happened at 5:21 EST today…

The page showed June 11, 2026 and has now been updated to June 12, 2026 in the last 10m.

https://imgur.com/a/lx7HCW9

Edit:

Google mislabels crawl dates clearly my bad

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spangrytoday at 3:43 AM

"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')?

transcriptasetoday at 1:44 AM

What access to Fable 5? I don’t think I ever had a prompt not get flagged and routed, and there was nothing in any of them even in the realm of a safety issue.

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iandanforthtoday at 1:07 AM

"We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET)"

This sounds exactly like the opening line from an apocalyptic sci-fi film.

jsw97today at 1:05 AM

If USG bans these models, what is the game plan wrt Chinese models? Will they also ban these (and how, esp open source)? And if not, how is this not throwing the ball game to China? There is no top-down control without international cooperation which, let’s face it, is not happening.

Another interpretation, of course, is that this is just US putting a thumb on the scale for US competitors around IPO time. It will be interesting to see if there are any fingerprints.

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TIPSIOtoday at 12:59 AM

Really sick of this stupid narrative.

The most ethical goal of an AI lab or government should be to bring the maximum amount of intelligence for as cheap as possible to the people equally.

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aunty_helentoday at 2:45 AM

These are the warning signs. The haves and have nots are about to part ways.

It's vitally important open source models are supported.

akmarinovtoday at 4:48 AM

EU to Apple: “You guys should make it so that any AI can be plugged into Siri”

Apple to EU: “nah, we need to be able to provide only the best”

US government: * starts pulling the plug on AIs outside the US *

You can kind of see how the EU has a point

punnerudtoday at 8:50 AM

Luckily I have a project with 200k lines of code, generating substantial revenue. Asked Fabel to run continuously through all features with up to 50 parallel agents, fix bugs, log improvements etc (just to max out tokens before the week reset)

reacharavindhtoday at 9:30 AM

The cynic outside observer of this administration’s mode of operation wonders if someone from OpenAI visited someone at the Trump admin and offered some benefit if they could scuttle Anthropic until they could catch up….

I’m looking for that news article in the next weeks…

ndneighbortoday at 2:29 AM

I see a lot of analysis here that this is good for Ant, but I beg to differ, it's a very bad place to be as a company serving enterprises when deployment risk is now present. This might delay Ant's financial goals in their ability to monetize Fable and other Mythos class models.

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felooboolooombatoday at 9:29 AM

Handicapper General leveling the playing field.

PeterStuertoday at 5:44 AM

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.

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WarmWashtoday at 3:58 AM

This is crushing precedent for Europe.

Maybe they'll have access to CCP models, but China will likely soon do them same. Maybe they will allow access but you must use it on their servers (i.e. share everything you do with the CCP).

Perhaps Mistral can pull something out, but how far ahead will the US and China be by then?

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doolstoday at 5:34 AM

I've been using Kimi k2.6 extensively via kimi-code and I only reach for frontier models when I do a multi-model security review (and Kimi actually does a better job of finding stuff, albeit with more false positives -- I often run Kimi's output through Opus 4.7/8 and Opus will concur that Kimi found genuine issues, while Opus didn't actually find those issues itself, for example).

So whatever, I just don't really feel the need to burn tokens on Fable anyway.

eastontoday at 1:18 AM

A company with different taste would redo that apple ad from the Power Mac era: “this model has been classified a munition”.

https://youtu.be/l2ThMmgQdpE

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gpmtoday at 1:14 AM

> 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

There's no way they have the authority to actually order this and not just request this right? If crypto is speech... LLMs definitely are...

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noisy_boytoday at 7:21 AM

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.

rvnxtoday at 9:04 AM

Well deserved though, "it's too dangerous, it's too dangerous to release"

Hypomixolydiantoday at 8:28 AM

Just few hours after Grok launches big promotional price drop, their competitor has its best model cut off. Sus af. The bid is on, so if Dario pays Don more than Elon paid, Mythos and Fable will be back.

h43ztoday at 9:25 AM

Today frontier models became Groypers.

0xbadcafebeetoday at 1:44 AM

Theory: Certain USG employees are going after Anthropic because they (or someone they know) has a financial stake in OpenAI. OpenAI has made the same claims, and months ago released "dangerous" security-analyzing models which "need limits", but USG never punished them for it.

Additional theory: Altman is behind it.

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fagnerbracktoday at 7:15 AM

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.

lionkortoday at 8:29 AM

This is so unbelievably incompetent from all sides, it's really impressive.

So I guess the real moat is whether the US govt is happy to make your models sound more capable than they are?

rwctoday at 2:02 AM

The timing (after 5pm ET on a Friday) is telling. Build a KYC module over the weekend and we’ll be back on Fable after uploading our ID Monday morning.

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gyoridavidtoday at 3:58 AM

Crying wolf bites back? This looks like a giant PR stunt to me. Maybe they got jealous of spacex's IPO and want to jack up their initial stock price even more?

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ospidertoday at 4:32 AM

Their propaganda has become a footgun. Only the government buys it and limits their access, no target user convinced, what a ironic moment.

andixtoday at 3:36 AM

Probably Iran used Fable to negotiate an awesome deal for them. And made the president angry. xD

watchful_moosetoday at 7:09 AM

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.

wood_spirittoday at 6:05 AM

The real question as xAI has just made Musk a trillionaire is how this, the most recent blow in a fight between the administration and Anthropic, impacts Anthropic’s IPO.

I’ve used Fable a lot. It’s a marginal improvement on Opus. It’s really not scary smart. I don’t want to go back to Opus because Fable was that little bit smarter, but it’s not like anything really changes at work and when we’re bumped back. So I’m really not buying any national security angle other than in the sense the administration can weaponise that to crown the AI race winners.

Artoooooortoday at 8:35 AM

US government should not have a say what members of other nations can and cannot use. Especially outside of USA.

jamesontoday at 6:20 AM

If Anthropic really found a model that's so powerful no one has, why don't they use it for themselves to create things no one can and accumulate unimaginable wealth?

tmp10423288442today at 1:46 AM

Europe 2031[0] imagined something like this would happen, but thought it would take a few years. AGI ahead of schedule

[0] https://europe2031.ai

zeven7today at 4:57 AM

I can’t understand why so many commenters are acting like this is bad news for Anthropic or their IPO, or that it’s some kind of comeuppance. An AI company can’t get better PR than the US government saying their model is so powerful it has to be shut down.

modelesstoday at 4:08 AM

It seems like both sides of this are intentionally interpreting the other's statements and actions in the least charitable way, as part of their political maneuvering. I wouldn't be surprised if Anthropic's overreaction here is intended to create damages which they can then sue the government over.

tapoxitoday at 1:11 AM

Part of me thinks fault lies with Anthropic for scaremongering, part has zero faith in the current administration especially after the "supply chain risk" designation.

It may be safer to just move the company to Canada.

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windextoday at 4:33 AM

They asked for a global AI moratorium and got one. Funny how things work out. Best of luck with the IPO.

cxmcctoday at 1:55 AM

Too bad, I have to go back to using Opus for centering my divs.

atleastoptimaltoday at 5:59 AM

It's crazy that people's anti-AI bias has got them rooting for the current administration just because it appeases their desire to see AI labs fail.

voxgentoday at 7:40 AM

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?

ethanhawksleytoday at 8:12 AM

As far as I can tell, this seems like it's impacting all of their Glasswing partners too, so no mythos for them either

SwellJoetoday at 2:24 AM

The biggest tech titans lined up to kiss the ring (and line Trump's pockets), and now we're seeing the obvious result.

Those who bribe Trump and do exactly his bidding (including helping out with war crimes and surveillance of US citizens) will be left alone, or even protected from competition and international law, as long as they keep giving Trump a taste. Those who balk, even a little, will be punished for it.

Republicans never wanted a free market, they just wanted a market that served their interests.

Russia and China could not dream of accomplishing the damage being done to US leadership in tech by our own government as we speak. If they have a wishlist, I'm sure it includes things like stopping immigration of scientists to the US, punishing innovators and elevating hucksters (make them trillionaires, for example), drive a wedge between the US and European allies, insure no one trusts hosting their data in the US or with US companies, erode democracy, and increase inequality especially at the margins (make the poor desperate and the wealthy beyond the reach of consequences).

tabs_or_spacestoday at 2:30 AM

I'm more interested in the business impact of this

So you spend billions of dollars training the model, only for it to be used in the US.

Then interesting to see where most of anthropic revenue comes from. If it's the US then they're fine but if it's global then they'll see a drop in revenue?

Then add to this decision, companies are going to significantly reduce their token spend.

So what does all of this mean for their IPO?

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mg74today at 2:05 AM

I just lost access. Back to 4.8 and 5.5. Like a caveman.

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csto12today at 1:02 AM

Someone forgot to cut a check to the Big Guy :^)

misiek08today at 7:30 AM

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?

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