Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models have now been suspended for roughly eight days, after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordered the company to bar foreign nationals from access on 12 June. Anthropic is a US AI developer; the two models power its consumer and frontier products. The promise that service would return "within days" has not been kept. Senior Anthropic staff met Department of Commerce officials in Washington this week to negotiate, House members publicly demanded answers on 18 June, and President Trump, at the G7 summit of advanced economies, said the talks were "going fine"1.
Lutnick's letter cited the risk of military-intelligence use by China and Russia. Axios reported a different sequence: relations ruptured after Anthropic refused to let the US military use its models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, and the government then placed the company on a national-security blacklist2. Anthropic counters that OpenAI's GPT-5.5 carries the identical jailbreak vulnerability and remains on public sale. A security action that hits one lab and spares its rival, after that lab funded a pro-regulation campaign, reads to critics as political retaliation rather than threat mitigation. Lutnick's office maintains the same export-control rule would apply to any vendor carrying the vulnerability.
The rupture went transatlantic. The G7 summit at Evian, held 15 to 17 June, failed to reverse the controls3. European governments arrived unsettled that a model they had deployed could be turned off worldwide by one letter, with no appeal and no notice to customers. Brussels has folded the episode into its European Technological Sovereignty Package, presented on 3 June, which bundles a chips programme with a Cloud and AI Development Act meant to wean the bloc off US infrastructure. A UK exemption was sought at Evian and refused.
