Anthropic

On 12 June 2026 Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordered Anthropic to bar all foreign nationals from Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5; unable to check nationality mid-conversation, Anthropic switched both models off for every customer on earth . The trigger was a rival's claimed jailbreak of Mythos 5, yet the same vulnerability sat in GPT-5.5, which stayed on sale; the administration invoked national-security authority under the deemed-export doctrine built for chips.

The EU's cybersecurity agency ENISA had joined Anthropic's restricted Project Glasswing programme in April and lost access within weeks, prompting an MEP to call the episode a real kill-switch. The Commerce Department partially lifted the restriction on 27 June, but the precedent survives the reversal .

News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson told investors on 8 May 2026 that News Corp anticipates a $1.5bn settlement with Anthropic, an unclosed figure roughly six times its prior five-year OpenAI deal . The same day Anthropic signed a seven-year, $1.8bn compute deal with Akamai, its largest contract ever, placing Claude inference on the EU network edge ahead of the AI Act's August deadline .

Separately, the $1.5bn Bartz v Anthropic class settlement, covering 92.77% of claimed works, remained under judicial submission through May and June with no final approval entered, leaving Anthropic's exposure as the industry's reference point for what publisher licensing now costs.

Anthropic's Claude Cowork launch on 30 January 2026 wiped roughly $24 billion from India's Nifty IT index within a week, as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech and Tech Mahindra each fell 5 to 8% on fears the tool would gut labour-arbitrage coding work .

Its own researchers later measured the mechanism directly: Massenkoff and McCrory found real Claude usage covers 75% of programmer tasks, against 35.8% for computer and maths roles more broadly, with the most exposed workers skewing older, more educated and higher-paid . That observed-exposure methodology is now the most cited internal evidence of real AI-driven labour substitution.