On June 12, Anthropic disabled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every customer after a U.S. Commerce Department export-control letter arrived at 5:21 p.m. ET, CNBC reported. The order told the company to suspend access“ by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.” Anthropic said it had no reliable way to verify nationality in real time, so it took both models offline for everyone. Other Anthropic models stayed up.
Axios reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent the letter to CEO Dario Amodei. The models would need a license for export, re-export, or domestic transfer. An administration official told Axios the trigger was a claimed jailbreak that alarmed national-security officials. Anthropic said the government did not provide specific details in the letter and called the episode a misunderstanding.
The disable came three days after the June 9 launch. Fable 5 was the public model. Mythos 5 was limited to Project Glasswing cybersecurity partners.
On June 30, Anthropic said Commerce had lifted the controls, CNBC and Reuters reported. Fable 5 returned globally on July 1 on Claude.ai, Claude Code, and the Claude platform. Mythos 5 had already been restored for a set of U.S. organizations after a June 26 approval. Cloud access on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry was to follow. On many paid plans, Fable 5 then ran on usage credits rather than as an included default, Anthropic said.
Buildtelligence published its operating read at buildtelligence.com/model-offline-outage: if a government letter can take the newest model offline on a Friday night, and there is no tested second path, that model is a single point of failure.
This is a continuity story. Access is not the same thing as a failover.
Sources
CNBC (June 12): cnbc.com
Axios: axios.com
CNBC (June 30): cnbc.com
Reuters: reuters.com
Buildtelligence: buildtelligence.com/model-offline-outage