So, even with the best-in-class models and all the compute they have, their strategy was still to not make a deal… did they even use AI reasoning to thrash this out?!
A short history of how we got here, because the chronology is the whole story.
January: the Pentagon demands unrestricted use of Claude for autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. Anthropic says no.
February: the President orders every federal agency to drop Anthropic. The Defense Secretary bans Pentagon contractors from doing business with them. A rival announces its classified-network deal within hours.
March: the Pentagon designates an American company a "supply chain risk" under a statute written for foreign adversaries. A federal judge blocks it.
May: the Pentagon signs AI deals with seven companies. Anthropic is not one of them.
June 9: Anthropic releases Fable 5.
June 12: Commerce issues an export control directive over a jailbreak that, by the government's own account, was demonstrated verbally, came with no written explanation, and involves a capability you can get from other publicly available models today.
Two things are true at once.
First: Anthropic spent months marketing Mythos as too dangerous to release. Sam Altman said it was "incredible marketing to say we have built a bomb." The Commerce Department has now formally agreed it is a bomb. If you describe your product as a munition in every press release, eventually a government takes you at your word. They wrote the legal predicate themselves and called it a brand.
Second: we have run this experiment before. In the 90s the government classified encryption as a munition under ITAR. Activists defeated it by printing PGP's source code as a book, because books are protected speech and floppy disks were arms exports. A t-shirt with three lines of RSA Perl was legally a munition. The controls collapsed because math does not stop at customs.
The new wrinkle is the "deemed export" rule: showing controlled technology to a foreign national inside the US counts as exporting it abroad. Which is why Anthropic's own foreign-national employees are now locked out of the model they built. The munition is in the building and the people who made it are not allowed to look at it.
The jailbreak is the paperwork. The refusal was in January.