All the news about Anthropic’s new AI fight with the White House
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- The Trump administration issued the export control directive at 5:21 PM on Friday (June 12) ordering Anthropic to block Fable 5 and Mythos 5 access for "any foreign national" inside or outside the US, including Anthropic's own foreign-born employees.
- Anthropic disabled both models for ALL customers — not just foreign nationals — because it said that was the only way to comply, pulling products it had spent the prior week publicly hyping.
- The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon cybersecurity research and CEO Andy Jassy's conversations with the White House helped trigger the order; the research allegedly showed Fable 5 could be prompted to serve information usable in cyberattacks.
- Semafor reported the White House was also driven by fears that a China-linked group had accessed Mythos, raising concerns about potential reverse-engineering of the model through AI distillation.
- Anthropic publicly disputed the order, calling the alleged jailbreak "narrow" and noting the government "did not provide specific details of its national security concern," while adding that similar vulnerabilities exist in other models including GPT 5.5.
- Fable 5 and Mythos 5 launched June 9 on the same foundation as Anthropic's Mythos Preview, which the company itself had previously deemed too dangerous to publicly release.
Why it matters: The shutdown demonstrates the US government's ability to unilaterally disable frontier AI products used by 'hundreds of millions' with no detailed written explanation, handing international competitors and non-US governments fresh justification to build sovereign AI stacks. For Anthropic specifically, a public dispute with Washington — on top of its existing Pentagon standoff — creates dual-front political risk few AI labs have faced.
