Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
The U.S. government has issued an export control directive suspending all access to Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, including foreign national employees. Anthropic must disable these models for all customers to comply, while other models remain unaffected. The directive cites a potential narrow jailbreak that could read and fix code, but Anthropic disputes the need for recall. The company is working to restore access and is engaging safety evaluators.
The Core Development
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.
We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.
Anthropic’s posture with respect to Fable’s safeguards, as laid out in our launch blog post , is the following:
Strategic Perspective & Ecosystem Impact
To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 ), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe. We will share more details over the next 24 hours.
We are complying with the government’s legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.
As we have stated publicly , we 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. This action does not adhere to those principles.
Why it matters
The move highlights how national security concerns can abruptly halt access to frontier AI models, affecting deployment strategies and raising questions about regulatory thresholds for model recall.