Inside the fight over Claude Mythos 5

As the rest of the country celebrated the USA’s first World Cup win and the New York Knicks championship, Anthropic spent its weekend fighting the Trump administration over its latest model release. At 5:21 PM on Friday, the company received a US export control directive to suspend access to its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 AI models by “any foreign national” inside or outside the US, “including foreign national Anthropic employees.” The only way that was possible, Anthropic determined, was to completely disable products it spent the past week hyping — and travel to Washington, DC in hopes of changing President Donald Trump’s mind. Now, over the coming days, the US government could dramatically alter the trajectory of the entire industry, dealing a major blow to American AI companies. Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5 are built on the same foundation as Anthropic’s Mythos Preview, which Anthropic dubbed too dangerous to publicly release. (The company’s warnings could be seen as genuine concern or more hype for their own model — or both.) Mythos 5 was made available to a select group of government agencies and companies, while Fable 5, which featured additional safeguards, was deemed “safe for general use.” But when a report indicated those guardrails may have failed, Anthropic’s dire warnings about Mythos falling into the wrong hands came back to haunt it. …