Anthropic shuts Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after U.S. export order

The dispute follows a broader shift in AI governance. The European Commission says the EU AI Act entered into force in 2024 and created specific duties for general-purpose AI models, with extra obligations for models designated as systemic risk. In the United States, President Joe Biden's 2023 AI executive order used federal reporting and safety-testing tools; President Donald Trump revoked it in January 2025 and later pursued a lighter national framework. The Anthropic order is different in tone: it uses export-control logic, closer to controls on chips or dual-use technology than to ordinary consumer software regulation.

Frontier AI is increasingly treated as strategic infrastructure alongside chips, cloud capacity and cybersecurity tools. The U.S. order suggests Washington may use national-security powers to control model access, not only hardware exports. For Europe, that raises the familiar sovereignty issue: reliance on foreign platforms can become a geopolitical vulnerability when policy priorities diverge.

The trigger was the U.S. government's 12 June directive to Anthropic, which the company says cited national-security concerns and required it to block foreign-national access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5.