White House export controls force Anthropic to pull Fable 5 models

A late-breaking export-control order from the White House forced Anthropic to pull its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models from public use, turning a flagship A.I. launch into a global shutdown within days. Anthropic said the June 12 directive required it to suspend access for any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national employees, and the company disabled both models worldwide rather than block access only by nationality.

The episode exposed how quickly national-security policy, corporate influence and A.I. competition can collide inside Washington. Anthropic said the government did not explain the national-security basis for the order. The company said it had investigated the concern and believed it pointed to a possible jailbreak vulnerability, not a broad failure of the models themselves, and added that similar vulnerabilities can appear in other publicly available systems.

The scramble intensified after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was among the tech leaders who raised concerns with senior Trump administration officials about security risks in Anthropic’s most advanced models. Amazon said it is not unusual for governments to seek its counsel on security risks, but it did not disclose what those conversations covered. Reuters-based reporting also said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a letter stating that Fable 5 and Mythos 5 would be subject to export controls outside the United States and for all foreign persons inside the country.

The timing underscored how narrow Anthropic’s public window was. Axios reported that Fable 5 lasted only days in the public’s hands after an urgent report from Amazon set off a scramble inside the White House. POLITICO described tense calls between Amodei and administration officials on Friday, a sign that export-control decisions around frontier A.I. are now being shaped in real time by a small circle of executives and policymakers.

The clash also reopened an older rift between Anthropic and the Trump administration over military use of its models. Anthropic had previously resisted Pentagon demands involving fully autonomous weapons systems, and the Pentagon later blacklisted the company as too dangerous for government use. The new restriction pushed the dispute beyond one company’s product cycle and into a broader fight over whether frontier A.I. systems should be treated as national-security assets.

In Europe, the move revived warnings about dependence on U.S. A.I. infrastructure and renewed calls to build homegrown frontier models. For Anthropic, the result was stark: a much-anticipated release vanished almost as soon as it arrived, after a White House intervention driven by security fears, corporate pressure and the new politics of export control.