WASHINGTON PULLS THE PLUG: US GOVERNMENT FORCES ANTHROPIC TO KILL FABLE 5 AND MYTHOS 5 FOR EVERY USER ON EARTH At 5:21 PM ET on June 12, Anthropic received a letter from the US Commerce Department citing national security authorities. The message was simple: shut it all down. Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, Anthropic’s most powerful models released just three days earlier, went dark for every single customer on the planet. The government claims it became aware of a method to jailbreak Fable 5. Anthropic reviewed the technique and says the vulnerabilities demonstrated are minor, non-universal, and already available in other publicly deployed models including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. The company published a full statement pushing back hard on the order, calling the action unfair, non-transparent, and technically unjustified. To comply, Anthropic had to pull access for all users globally because the company cannot filter customers by nationality in real time. That means American citizens, Anthropic’s own foreign-national employees, and international customers are all locked out. All other Claude models remain online. Anthropic’s technical staff are now in Washington trying to resolve the dispute. The company believes this is a misunderstanding and is working to restore access. The government has not provided a formal technical disclosure or a clear path to compliance. This is the first time the US government has ordered a frontier AI lab to shut down a commercial product in real time. If the standard being applied here spread across the industry, Anthropic says it would essentially halt all new frontier model deployments for every company in the space. Keywords: Anthropic Fable 5 shutdown, Claude Mythos 5 suspended, US government AI export control, AI national security 2026