U.S. government forces Anthropic to pull its most powerful AI models offline
In an unprecedented move, the U.S. government forced Anthropic to take its two most capable artificial intelligence models offline Friday evening, marking the first time a federal agency has ordered a leading AI company to withdraw a publicly deployed product from the market.
The Commerce Department issued an export control directive at 5:21 p.m. ET on June 12, instructing Anthropic to suspend all access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national — whether inside or outside the United States, including the company’s own foreign-born employees. Unable to selectively enforce that restriction, Anthropic disabled both models for every customer worldwide.
The directive, signed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and sent to CEO Dario Amodei, cited national security concerns tied to a reported “jailbreak” of Fable 5 — a technique allegedly allowing users to bypass safety guardrails. Anthropic disputed the characterization, saying the government had provided only verbal evidence of a “potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” amounting to little more than asking the model to audit code for vulnerabilities — a capability already present in competing models like OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.
The shutdown came days after Fable 5’s public launch and while Anthropic was navigating a confidential IPO filing, compounding the business disruption. Analysts said the action exposes a broader vulnerability: as AI becomes embedded in business operations, research, and daily life, its availability can now be switched off by regulators with minimal notice.
The move is also seen as downstream of a Pentagon designation in February that labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk” after the company refused to remove two ethical red lines from its government contracts: no mass surveillance of Americans, and no fully autonomous weapons without human oversight.
“The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.”
— Anthropic, official statement, June 12, 2026
Anthropic said it is working to restore access and called on the government to share specifics of its security concerns. All other Claude models remain available. No timeline for reinstatement has been given.
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