Fable 5 and Mythos 5 suspended by directive of the U.S. government

Anthropic deactivated Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users following a U.S. Department of Commerce export control directive over national security concerns.

On national security grounds, an export control directive from the Department of Commerce compels Anthropic to cut off access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals, whether on U.S. soil or not, including company employees. Unable to sort its users by nationality in real time, the company has deactivated both models for its entire customer base; the rest of the Claude lineup remains available. Fable 5 is the consumer version, with reinforced guardrails, of a Mythos-class model, Anthropic's most powerful to date, designed for complex reasoning and long-duration agentic coding; Mythos 5 is its nearly unrestricted twin, especially in cybersecurity. The government claims to have identified a jailbreak method on Fable 5, paving the way for offensive use; Anthropic views this as a misunderstanding, deems the vulnerability minor and already accessible elsewhere, and says it is working on a swift restoration.

The reception was already rough before the cutoff. Overzealous classifiers blocked innocuous queries, refused a simple "hello," and dodged opinion questions about Elon Musk as well as Dario Amodei, to the point that Anthropic conceded poor judgment and backed down in less than two days. Added to this are a thirty-day data retention policy that prompted Microsoft to ban the tool for its own employees, a high price point, and the feeling of two-tiered access: a throttled version for the public, a beefed-up version for a few selected partners via Project Glasswing. On the other hand, raw benchmarks impress, and some commend a company that takes safety seriously.

The irony of the timing remains. Anthropic spent weeks dramatizing the dangerousness of its own models and advocating for states to be able to pull the plug on risky deployments. Now it's taken at its word, on its most advanced product. After repeatedly raising the threat and cultivating doomsday marketing, it's hard to be surprised by what followed.