alt Hacker NewsStatement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
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PowerPC Mac G4 (1999): https://youtu.be/lb7EhYy-2RE
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.
On the plus side, it’s Friday night. Hopefully this is sorted out by Monday morning.
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?
What does jailbreaking have to do with nationality? So Americans can jailbreak it, but others can't?
Sounds like they only want Americans to access SOTA AI.
It might have been starting to become more clear from this one X-post.
https://xunroll.com/thread/2064776322979676227
Using combinations of jailbreaking-techniques including: writing cyrillic helped a lot to disarm the filter.
What is going on at Anthropic?
First, it comes out that on some specified subset of queries they will simply downgrade you to a different model. One example is if you are doing model research. Imagine OSX shutting down if it detects you’re working on software.
And now they’ve decided that they’ll just shut off access to the model completely as part of what seems to be a sort of marketing stunt or temper tantrum.
They’re a service provider. Can you imagine AWS just deciding you’re getting nullrouted over some unrelated fight they’re having with the DoD?
If they weren’t a supply chain risk before this, they’re sort of doing everything they can to become one.
This is devastating - particularly the part about targeting non-US nationals.
Andrej Kaparethy can't do his job.
This is going to have a huge effect.
Chinese open weight models, which were in a 'reluctant' category aka 'maybe there's some CCP propaganda embedded' just got a whole new life.
Arbitrary and instant cut off from key technology is going reshape a lot of things.
Well over 1/2 of US growth is now AI and well over 1/2 that revenue is outside of US.
Space X IPO in addition to OpenAI and Antrhopic IPO's ... would be put in gigantic risk in any rational market situation.
Is this legal? Seems pretty arbitrary. Its not like usa forbids selling pentesting services to foreigners.
I'm surprised that (all) these models haven't been export controlled already. Relatively benign software like VMware is export controlled or even hobbyist radio projects have gotten hairy with ITAR.
But a model that can provide general information, research, or source code for most modern technology?
It is really unusual that this is the first notice of this
To actually follow through with this fully they would have had to revoke all kinds of internal access for foreign nationals and demand they immediately return their hardware (at 5pm on a Friday no less), no?
Unless folks are hearing that they did this I smell marketing and/or PR as the main driver of the action.
Well, they just pulled one of the strongest models I've ever used. My concern isn't that I'll have to go back to 4.8 or GPT-5.5, it's where do they stop? What if they decide 5.5 or 4.8 are too powerful too? Do those get removed next?
Is open source next on the list? Better grab the latest open source models now and get your Blackwell 6000, Spark, or Mac mini fired up and ready to go. I think you're going to need it.
Which arm of the "US government"? What legal framework allows them to issue such a directive?
Anyone who things a thing like ”perfect jailbreak resistance” is possible should read Gödel-Escher-Bach
So the white house likes to do a lot of things they don't actually have authority to do, so the next question is if they don't have the authority to do this, can Anthropic sue for damages for not only tokens people were not able to spend, but also market share lost to the setback?
This is going to be tectonic. Any business relying on US models and compute is going to have a busy week.
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?
Well deserved though, "it's too dangerous, it's too dangerous to release"
I’ll just say that AI companies need to be pounding the table more about the necessity of AI. The US (and most other countries) have zero idea how to pay for its deficit spending. The only hope is massive GDP based growth and the only idea how to do that is AI.
This is rarely discussed, and while I agree we should be spending non-zero effort on safety, stopping progress is not an option.
“Including Employees”.
Highly reliable supply chains to bet the entire future on :)
From a European perspective, based on the assumption API inference cannot be trusted anymore -> it means investing in local inference + building harnesses that can squeeze out all the power from the best open weights models.
US government should not have a say what members of other nations can and cannot use. Especially outside of USA.
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?
So…US wants to win the AI race by…preventing AI use. Classic.
Are there any European alternatives to US model providers other than Chinese providers?
I guess they’ll just have to put the weights into a book format and publish the physical copies
I am confused.
They told us this model is dangerous, and now they are complaining that someone with more guns than them said releasing something dangerous is not okay?
This is DOD retaliation
As far as I can tell, this seems like it's impacting all of their Glasswing partners too, so no mythos for them either
This is very bad. They want ID checks to use AI to prove citizenship.
I wonder if this is specific to the animus toward anthropic or if this is the new industry wide level cap. Seems like a pretty big problem for the AI market in general, a lot this investment is predicated on better and better models.
It’s clear from this post that Anthropic doesn’t believe this is legal, but is complying for the sake of it. Federal law doesn’t generally have broad authorities to send demand letters like these.
Related ongoing thread - others?
Our response to the US ban on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48512915 - June 2026 (17 comments)
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…
Aren't all the super dangerous things already built?
If you knew what you were talking about 4.6,8 could already do mythos level hunting and tool building.
This is marketing.
1. Release fable, highly nerfed and limited 2. See the compute capacity limiter pegged day after day 3. Lobby to the government, claiming ai is super unsafe and not aligned and they must do something 4. Government "forces" anth to turn off 5. Anth takes the pressure off of compute capacity, and gets to blame it on the govt
Like you're telling me fable is somehow an order of magnitude better than GPT 5.5 to the point where it compromises national security, despite evals and anecdotes saying otherwise? Nah.
Out of curiosity, can that model be trained from the beginning without touching "sensitive" areas and remain useful in others? Will it be able to help in building biological weapons without being trained on articles and books about biology/ medicine?
I used it a lot for the few days I could. It's a very strong model. However for the long term I want a model I can use with a fully custom client, so Antrhopic was never in my long term plans. Which is sad, because the model is absolutely amazing. It seems incapable of making a mistake almost. And I'm throwing things at it that other models struggle with.
LLMs are getting so expensive that for many people are already unavailable (except for subsidized subscriptions). This might just accelerate general unavailability of frontiers models to general public which would happen in near future anyway. Frontier LLMs are just switching to B2B only earlier.
Handicapper General leveling the playing field.
As an Australian, I’m not particularly surprised by this. From purely a capacity perspective, it seemed fair to reason, if AI is so powerful and capacity is an issue, why wouldn’t you prioritise domestic and restrict foreign usage.
It’s a massive betrayal for foreign entities and it would be silly to continue with all my eggs in anthropic basket but I get it.
Anthropic has made the suppression of advanced technology a mainstream issue. This is an exceptionally interesting development because the refrain from the skeptics, was "Why wouldn't they release the advanced technology if they could make all that money?" and "Once people knew about the technology they'd never be able to stop it." Well here we are with a verifiable demonstrable suppressed advanced technology.
So, we'll have Opus 5 soon which is "as close to Fable 5 as possible". This is a good thing for the community)
IANAL. Can any lawyers comment on whether Anthropic could sue, and if so, whether they would be likely to win?
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.