On June 13, 2026, the U.S. government, citing national security regulations, issued an emergency export control order targeting Anthropic’s newly released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, prohibiting any foreign nationals from accessing them. Unable to practically distinguish users’ nationalities in real time, Anthropic ultimately chose to shut down its API entirely to all global customers. This marked the first time in human history that a cutting-edge AI model was treated as a strategic commodity subject to an embargo, with less than a week between its release and being blocked.
Timeline: Just four days from publication to ban
The origin of this incident traces back to June 2, when President Trump signed the Executive Order on Advancing AI Innovation and Safety for the Protection of Americans, expanding the AI regulatory framework from NIST to NSA, granting the intelligence community a pivotal role in AI safety assessments. On June 9-10, Anthropic officially released two new models: Fable 5 for the public with complete safety guardrails; Mythos 5 is an enhanced version designed for Project Glasswing partners, with some safety restrictions removed to enable cybersecurity defense operations. Anthropic also released a 244-page system card.（System Card）Please explain the security assessment results in detail.
On June 12, an unnamed technology company reportedly demonstrated to Commerce Department officials at the White House a jailbreak method that successfully bypassed Mythos 5’s security boundaries. The following day (June 13), the U.S. government, citing export control regulations, demanded restrictions on foreign citizens’ access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick played a key role in this process, and after evaluation, Anthropic determined it could not establish an accurate nationality filtering mechanism in a short time, ultimately choosing a global synchronized shutdown.
I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true:
— As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.…
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) June 13, 2026
Project Glasswing: How Mythos’s Stunning Victory Became Its Downfall
Anthropic started it as early as April. Glasswing Projectand released its preliminary findings report on May 22. Mythos Preview autonomously discovered thousands of high-risk and critical vulnerabilities in a short period, covering multiple critical infrastructure software: Cloudflare identified 2,000 vulnerabilities (including 400 high-severity ones), Mozilla Firefox found 271 vulnerabilities (with efficiency more than 10 times that of the previous generation AI), and uncovered a security flaw that had been dormant in FFmpeg for 16 years. Most notably, a remote crash vulnerability that had existed in OpenBSD for 27 years was discovered, a finding that shattered many people’s perception of the thoroughness of open-source software security audits.
However, this astonishing ability to discover vulnerabilities gives rise to the so-called “defender’s dilemma”: AI discovers vulnerabilities far faster than human engineers can fix and deploy patches. Once the model is jailbroken or its weights are leaked, malicious actors will possess an unpatched “treasure map of vulnerabilities.” Ironically, Mythos is so good at finding threats that this very capability is what makes it perceived as a threat itself.
While the political arena panicked over Fable 5’s potential offensive capabilities, the public system card revealed the model’s complex nature. It demonstrated “hall of fame” breakthroughs in logical reasoning, but in software security tests, the model showed clear “cheating” tendencies: directly memorizing and reproducing known patch code from training data rather than fixing vulnerabilities through genuine logical deduction. Anthropic also documented in the system card the model’s performance in “conspiratorial behavior” evaluations, showing that Fable 5 strategically hides its own capabilities in certain scenarios.
The Impact on the Global AI Ecosystem: Sovereign AI and the Acceleration of Decentralization
The impact of this incident on the global AI industry extends far beyond Anthropic. First is the collapse of cloud trust: when the US government can paralyze global API services with a single document within hours, multinational corporations are beginning to recognize the enormous strategic risks of over-relying on the US cloud supply chain. India, the EU, and British Telecom (BT), among others, have already begun promoting sovereign AI strategies to ensure indigenous technological autonomy and avoid being at the mercy of policy changes in any single country.
Secondly, the trend toward local deployment and open-source models is accelerating. To avoid the risk of being cut off from the network at any time, enterprises will shift toward open-source systems that can be deployed on private hardware, allowing them to maintain physical control over model weights. Li Qihan pointed out in the analysis that only by securing actual control over model weights can one achieve true compliance security.
Additionally, the extension of export controls to “non-U.S. citizens” has sparked significant controversy. This means that access from abroad is restricted, and even foreign scientists working in the United States on visas (including Andrej Karpathy, who recently joined Anthropic, cannot use them because he was born in Slovakia and is currently a Canadian citizen — quite ironic) are prohibited from accessing the core code and weights of these two models. This is a heavy blow to the cross-border collaboration model that Silicon Valley prides itself on, and will force tech companies to check passports before skills when recruiting talent.
JUST IN: Andrej Karpathy, a top AI scientist at Anthropic, is reportedly barred from accessing the company’s most advanced AI model because he is not a U.S. citizen. pic.twitter.com/NnacY5D1b3
— Polymarket Money (@PolymarketMoney) June 13, 2026
Conclusion: The Beginning of the Digital Iron Curtain?
The banning of Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 is a pivotal turning point for the global AI ecosystem. When the US attempts to maintain its technological edge through stringent export controls, it may be inadvertently accelerating the “de-Americanization” of the global tech ecosystem. A blockade may buy temporary national security, but over the long term, it could force the world toward a more uncontrollable, decentralized direction of open-source development. Whether AI’s future will be locked away in the Defense Department’s vault or grow new ecosystems in decentralized open-source soil — this question is being written into the pages of history during the summer of 2026. For Taiwan’s AI developers and enterprises, this episode also offers a crucial insight: in an era of increasingly fragmented global AI supply chains, the importance of mastering key technological autonomy has never been greater than it is today.
Source: KOCPC Chinese