Why Anthropic Disabled Its Most Powerful AI Model Days After Launch

Anthropic disabled public access to its most powerful AI model, Fable 5, just three days after its release.

13 Jun 2026, 07:00 · www.ndtv.com

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US orders Anthropic to revoke foreign access to AI models Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 due to security concerns
Anthropic suspended access for all users to comply with the government's export control directive
Government cited a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak as the basis for the directive

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The US government on Friday ordered Anthropic to immediately revoke access for foreign nationals (including those employed by Anthropic) to two of its most powerful AI models - Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 - citing national security concerns. Anthropic went a step ahead and suspended access for all. The directive was to revoke access for all foreign nationals, whether inside the US or outside.

Anthropic put out a lengthy statement in which it said: "The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance." It added it believes "this is a misunderstanding" and the company is working to restore access "as soon as possible."

The government's "export control directive" to Anthropic came amid concerns of a potential "jailbreak." In the statement it released, Anthropic said, the government has provided only verbal evidence of a "potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak". Simply put, a jailbreak is a technique used to bypass an AI model's built-in safety restrictions and obtain responses it would normally refuse to provide.

"The government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws," the company that's looking to IPO (initial public offering) soon, said.

"Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI's GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe. We will share more details over the next 24 hours," the statement said.

Anthropic was pretty vocal in airing its frustration at the directive: "If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers." It said it disagrees that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people, while highlighting that its "safeguards are so strong that many users have complained that they are overly broad."

Anthropic and the US government have had a complicated relationship. It has been locked in a standoff with the Trump administration for refusing to allow its technology to potentially be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, leading the Pentagon to cut contracts with the company.

Why The Fuss?

Fable 5 is built on Anthropic's underlying model Mythos, which the company previewed in April which the company previewed in April and kept it away from mass release because it was deemed too powerful amid concerns that bad actors could use it to hack critical infrastructure such as banking systems or build bioweapons. According to the company, Mythos was able to identify flaws in every major operating system and web browser it tested, some of these vulnerabilities were reportedly lying undetected for decades. Hence the company launched a controlled program called Project Glasswing, sharing it with around 50 vetted organizations, including Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike, to utilise for defensive cybersecurity work.

Just this Tuesday, the company released a version of Mythos with guardrails to block responses in high-risk areas like cybersecurity and biology. If someone tried to utilise the latest version Fable 5 to hack into a critical system or build a bioweapon, the model would automatically slip back into the earlier less-capable version called Claude Opus 4.8.

According to Vals AI, which tracks AI model performance, Fable 5 ranked as the most capable publicly available AI model on its benchmark tests.

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