U.S. order keeps Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline as refund window closes

Eight days after a Commerce Department export-control directive forced Anthropic to globally disable its two most capable models, the company's international chief says access will return 'in coming days' — but subscribers from the brief launch window face a June 20 refund deadline.

Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 remain dark worldwide eight days after a Commerce Department directive arrived at the company’s offices at 5:21 p.m. Eastern on June 12, ordering the suspension of all foreign-national access under national-security authorities. The order, signed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and addressed to chief executive Dario Amodei according to The Wall Street Journal, reaches even Anthropic’s own foreign-national employees, whether based inside or outside the United States.

The stated trigger is a jailbreak that allegedly bypasses Fable 5’s cybersecurity safeguards by prompting the model to read a codebase and surface software flaws. Anthropic says it received only verbal evidence and that the same capability is widely available from other frontier models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.

“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,” the company said in a written statement, warning that the precedent “would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”

The proximate cause appears less abstract. Korea JoongAng Daily reports the directive was issued after the Washington Post identified a Korean telecommunications company, alleged to have China ties, as one of the roughly 150 partners with Mythos access through Project Glasswing, alongside Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and SK Telecom.

Speaking at a Seoul press conference meant to mark the Korea expansion, international chief Chris Ciauri said he’s “very confident that in the coming days, the models will become available again.” Subscribers from the brief launch window have until today to claim a refund.

The shutdown lands on a company already absorbing a February Trump order halting federal-agency use of its models, a March Pentagon “supply chain risk” designation, and the awkwardness of a confidential IPO filing at a reported $965 billion valuation. Each escalation has arrived through a different agency, on a different rationale. That isn’t policy drift. It’s a posture.

U.S. order keeps Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline as refund window closes

Sources