Enterprise

U.S. government orders Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing export controls

A Commerce Department directive issued Friday forced Anthropic to cut off worldwide access to its two most capable models. Reporting points to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy as the figure who flagged a claimed jailbreak to the White House.

By Asher Glick · Enterprise software desk · 2026-06-15 · 4 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Hannah Tu — The United States Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

At 5:21pm ET on Friday, an export control directive from the U.S. Department of Commerce landed at Anthropic, and within hours the company had cut off worldwide access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, its two most capable models. Fortune reports it’s the first time Washington has used export controls to shut down a commercial AI model already in wide public use.

The order’s scope is what made compliance binary. It required suspending access for any foreign national worldwide, including Anthropic’s own foreign-national employees, leaving the company no option but to pull the models for everyone. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent the formal letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei notifying the company of the restrictions, per Wall Street Journal reporting cited by TIME.

The trigger, according to Fortune, CNBC, and reporting from The Information, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal, traces back to Amazon. Researchers there used a series of prompts to coax a Mythos-class model into producing restricted information about cyberattacks. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised the issue directly with senior administration officials on Thursday. By Friday evening the directive had landed.

Anthropic’s account is markedly different. The company says it received only verbal notice of what it called a “potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak,” describing the technique as prompting the model to read a specific codebase and identify software flaws, a capability already widely available in other public models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.

White House AI adviser David Sacks offered yet a third version over the weekend on X, writing that a highly credible, trusted partner of both Anthropic and the government had identified a jailbreak in Fable 5’s guardrails and that the administration asked Amodei to fix the issue or withdraw the model. Amodei refused, Sacks wrote, and the export control followed.

The sequencing is what stings. Fable 5 shipped only three days before the shutdown, as the public-facing sibling of Mythos, which Anthropic had restricted to roughly 50 vetted partners through Project Glasswing, a list that includes Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike. Senior Anthropic technical staff traveled to Washington over the weekend, and the company says it’s working to restore access as soon as possible. The episode arrives ahead of an expected IPO, with a competitor-turned-investor as the proximate cause of the regulatory hammer falling.

Sources