FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
San Francisco, CA — June 12, 2026
Anthropic has suspended all customer access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after receiving a US government export-control directive issued under national security authorities. The company said access to all of its other models is unaffected.
According to Anthropic, the directive arrived at 5:21 p.m. ET and requires the company to disable both models for every customer — including foreign nationals inside and outside the United States, and the company’s own foreign-national employees — in order to comply. The order did not state the specific national security concern behind it.
What the government raised
Anthropic said its understanding is that the government believes a method exists to bypass, or jailbreak, Fable 5. The company said it reviewed a demonstration of the technique and found that it surfaced only a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities — the kind, it added, that other publicly available models can also identify without any bypass. The reported capability, Anthropic said, is widely available from other models and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.
Anthropic’s position on safeguards
The company defended the protections it built for the models, which it said were red-teamed for thousands of hours before launch alongside the US government, the UK AI Safety Institute, and outside organizations. Anthropic said no tester has yet found a universal jailbreak capable of broadly defeating the model’s safeguards, and described its approach as defense in depth: keeping any bypass narrow or expensive to produce, and pairing it with monitoring and 30-day data retention to detect and shut down attacks quickly.
While it is complying with the order, Anthropic said it disagrees that a narrow, non-universal jailbreak should be grounds for recalling a commercial model used by hundreds of millions of people. Applying that standard across the industry, the company warned, would effectively halt new model deployments for every frontier developer.
Process concerns
Anthropic reiterated its public position that governments should be able to block unsafe deployments through a process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action, the company said, did not meet those principles.
The company apologized to customers for the disruption, called the situation a misunderstanding, and said it is working to restore access as soon as possible. It said it would share more details within 24 hours.
About Anthropic
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company based in San Francisco and the maker of Claude.
Editor’s note: Reproduced by the StrideNote press desk as a sample. The statement and all positions described are Anthropic’s; see the original announcement on anthropic.com/news for the full text.