WASHINGTON, June 13 (Nationwide Times) — Anthropic said it is disabling access to its most advanced artificial intelligence models for all users after U.S. officials moved to block foreign-national access to the tools, a product shutdown that reaches beyond the foreign users named in the government action.
The affected models are Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The company said June 13 that the directive forced it to suspend the models broadly to comply with U.S. restrictions, according to Anthropic’s statement as described by the BBC. The Wall Street Journal, citing a letter from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and an administration official, reported that the Commerce Department treated the models as subject to export limits.
The practical result is clear: Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are no longer available to users while Anthropic responds to the federal order. What is less clear from the available public record is the exact legal mechanism used by the Commerce Department, the full text of Lutnick’s letter, and the technical evidence behind the government’s concern.
According to the letter described by The Wall Street Journal, the restriction barred use of Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by clients outside the United States and by foreign nationals inside the country. That framing places the action in a national-security and export-control context, rather than as a routine product recall or software bug response.
Anthropic said U.S. national-security officials did not identify a specific security failure in the models, according to the BBC. The company said its understanding was that the government believed there was a method to bypass, or jailbreak, Fable 5. Anthropic also said it reviewed a demonstration of the alleged bypass and found only a limited number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities.
The records available in the public reporting do not include independent technical verification of the alleged jailbreak method. They also do not include model cards, release notes or other vendor technical documents showing the precise capabilities of Fable 5 and Mythos 5, beyond the fact that access is being disabled.
That gap matters because the federal action changed the shipping status of Anthropic’s newest tools. Fable 5 had been released privately in April for preview and testing before a public launch shortly before the suspension, according to the BBC’s account of Anthropic’s explanation. The supplied record does not establish the exact public launch date or the same level of release detail for Mythos 5.
The June action follows a separate, months-long fight between Anthropic and the Trump administration over military use of Claude, the company’s AI assistant. In February, Anthropic said it would not remove safety restrictions for two use cases: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons capable of lethal action without human intervention. Amodei said the company wanted to keep serving the Defense Department while preserving those exceptions, according to public statements cited in national reporting.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Pentagon officials took the opposite position, arguing that a private company should not restrict lawful military use of a critical technology. NBC News, citing Anthropic and a senior Defense Department official, reported in March that the Defense Department had designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk to national security. Anthropic said that label would bar defense contractors from using its products on defense-related work.
Anthropic said it would challenge the designation in court. The BBC later reported that a judge ruled the Pentagon’s order could not be enforced while the lawsuit proceeds. The available record does not identify the court, judge, case caption or docket number.
The dispute also spread across civilian agencies. Reuters reported that the State Department, Treasury Department and Department of Health and Human Services were moving away from Anthropic products after President Donald Trump’s directive and the Pentagon fight. Reuters based that account on a State Department memo, an email from State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott, a post by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other agency communications.
The State Department memo said its internal chatbot, StateChat, would use GPT4.1 from OpenAI during the transition, according to Reuters. Reuters also reported that HHS communications pointed staff toward alternatives including Google Gemini.
Taken together, the records show two related federal actions against Anthropic in 2026: a defense-procurement dispute over the company’s refusal to remove certain safety limits, and a later Commerce Department action that led Anthropic to suspend Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. The first dispute turned on how much control the military should have over AI tools used in defense work. The second directly changed product access by taking Anthropic’s newest models offline under a claimed national-security restriction.
