On 12th June 2026, the US government ordered Anthropic to pull its two most capable AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, offline for every foreign national on the planet. Anthropic couldn’t reliably separate foreign users from everyone else in real time, so to comply it switched both models off for all of us. Anthropic’s statement is
These weren’t minor releases. Fable 5 was the frontier: major jumps in reasoning, and the kind of huge-context work nothing else on the market gets close to. And as far as anyone can tell, this is the first time a government has reached in and switched off a frontier AI model that was already deployed and in people’s hands. The stated reason? “National Security.”
Read that again. AI models are now being treated like arms, sitting in the same export-control bracket as missile guidance systems and fighter jets. Here’s the difference. Nobody is betting the British economy on missile guidance systems. We are betting it on AI: to 100x our productivity, grow the economy, save the NHS, keep us safer on the streets. We’ve pinned the entire future to a technology that another government can switch off with a letter sent at 5pm on a
And it gets worse, because the “national security” reason is disputed. Anthropic says it’s a misunderstanding, that the capability the government is worried about is already available in other models including OpenAI’s, and that it’s working to turn the models back on. They may well be right. But that’s