Washington Pulls the Plug

Three days after launch, the most capable model Anthropic had ever shipped went dark. On Friday June 12 the company received a US-government directive "citing national security authorities" and within hours disabled both Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every user on earth. The order on its face only barred access by foreign nationals (including Anthropic's own foreign-national staff), but since you can't reliably gate a model by passport in real time, Anthropic pulled the lot.

The stated trigger was a reported "jailbreak" of Fable 5, discovered by Amazon. The federal administration reported the issue to Anthropic, who concluded it was a narrow, non-universal technique that surfaced a handful of already-known minor vulnerabilities, asking for more details. The administration didn't like the fact Anthropic didn't act immediately and asked a follow-up, hence the directive.

The irony writes itself: the lab that spent the month publicly asking the world to keep the option to pause frontier AI got exactly that, pointed at itself, 72 hours after going public.

Sources: Anthropic statement, CNBC, TechCrunch, NBC News, Al Jazeera