As of 5:12 p.m. ET on Friday evening, Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models vanished from the internet like a magician's assistant who forgot the safety word. Other Claude models remain available, presumably because they haven't been deemed a national security threat yet.

According to Anthropic, the "US government, citing national security authorities" issued an export directive requiring the company to disable access to both models for "any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees." The net effect: nobody gets to play with the new toys, regardless of where they're standing.

Anthropic initially called the government's statement a "directive" but later described it as a letter that did "not provide specific details of its national security concern." The company carefully framed the situation, stating, "Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or 'jailbreaking' Fable 5." The company said it saw a demonstration of a "specific technique" used to identify "a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities" - which raises the question: if they're previously known, were they fixed?

Anthropic pushed back by noting that the vulnerabilities are "relatively simple" and that "other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass." The company specifically name-checked OpenAI's GPT-5.5, essentially telling the government, "Hey, the other kids are doing it too."

According to Anthropic, "To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak" - which apparently consists of telling the model to read a "specific codebase and fix any software flaws." The company validated that "the level of capability displayed" isn't unique to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and is "used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe."

Over the weekend, the internet did what it does best - dug in - and additional details emerged. David Sacks, former White House special advisor for AI and crypto and current co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, posted on X that the administration asked Anthropic to fix the jailbreak or pull the model, and that CEO Dario Amodei refused. Politico reported that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy flagged the problem to the White House, setting export controls in motion, while The Verge reported Amazon's own security research led to the ban. The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon took the jailbreak findings to the Commerce Department, which then imposed the ban. Axios reported that Commerce gave Anthropic about 90 minutes on Friday to take the models down, with the formal control letter following at 5:30 p.m.

Pete Hegseth, U.S. secretary of war, posted on X, "Three months ago, @DeptofWar kicked @AnthropicAl out of our building-forever. Every passing day proves why that was the right move." Chief Information Officer of the Department of War Kirsten Davies added, "We fully support @POTUS and @SecWar in prioritizing national security... Some things are simply more important than revenue cycles, clickbait, and pre-IPO valuation. America First. Always."

As of Sunday evening, Axios reported that Anthropic senior technical staff were dispatched to Washington for face-to-face discussions with the White House.

Anthropic said it "believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts" - but disagrees that "the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people." The company also warned that if this response were applied "across the industry," it would have chilling effects on new model deployments by all frontier model providers.

Anthropic ended its announcement by apologizing for the disruption, saying it believes "this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible."

From a marketing perspective, this is an absolute gift: having the White House declare your product too dangerous for foreign nationals is the kind of endorsement money can't buy - even if nobody really wants that kind of endorsement when there's a real risk the flagship product might get permanently grounded.