most people building on frontier AI have been operating on an assumption that broke last night. access to the most capable models isn't a utility you subscribe to - it's a privilege that can be revoked for hundreds of millions of users, developers, and startups with essentially no process. not just for people outside the US, but for everyone, including American nationals themselves. the scarier part isn't even that it happened. it's that there's no real mechanism preventing it from happening again, to any model, at any time, for any reason that gets dressed up as national security.
the "just switch to open-source Chinese models" response misses something very important. right now, Chinese labs release open weights partly because it's a competitive weapon - it compresses American labs' margins and guarantees China access to capable models regardless of export controls. but that calculus changes the moment China reaches frontier parity. why keep giving away your best models when the US is hoarding its own? the latest big Qwen releases are already closed. the window where open-source AI functions as a global equalizer is closing from both ends at once, and faster than most people think.
if you can't run the software on your own hardware, assume it can be taken away at any moment.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement:
anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…