Tech Things: There is a massive shadow hanging over this Fable thing

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Tech Things: There is a massive shadow hanging over this Fable thing<br>Man, I was just trying to relax and (have my agent) code on a Friday

theahura<br>Jun 13, 2026

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Well. I wasn’t quite planning to write this evening, since it’s Friday and Friday’s are for when I like to code, and when I say code I mean ‘let the agent code while I watch soccer with my friends.’ Recently I’ve been making some fun html games. I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling. But in the middle of me thinking about how to make my shitty backrooms-themed shooter play a bit better, the agent went ‘Sorry! This model doesn’t exist any more!’

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My first thought was that I needed to re-login. I run a ton of agents in parallel most of the time, so my instinct was that this was just a really really weird limit error. I vaguely knew that Anthropic was thinking about pulling Fable off the subscription plans so I switched to the API. Still nothing.<br>My team built a custom rust agent client, it’s pretty great. But my next thought was ‘o shit the harness bricked’, and I started poking around in Rust, which is a language I barely know even though I’ve ostensibly written tens of thousands of lines of code of it. At which point my friend went ‘the government banned fable.’<br>What the fuck?<br>But it’s true.

The US Gov directed Anthropic to disable access to Fable and Mythos to any foreign national anywhere in the world, including those in the US, including Anthropic employees. This is an impossible ask, and the Government knows it, so Anthropic has disabled all access to Fable/Mythos.<br>The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.<br>We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.<br>We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe. We will share more details over the next 24 hours.<br>We are complying with the government’s legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, 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.

A few thoughts about this.<br>Up front, I’m extremely conflicted.

I am an AI doomer most days. Having trained many many deep neural networks in my time, I have a deep appreciation for the ways in which optimizers can go wrong. We optimize what we can measure, not what we actually want to achieve. We hope and pray that these are the same thing, but they often aren’t. We want to build good products, but we don’t know how to measure that, so we optimize for engagement. We want to teach kids how to read and write, so we optimize for test scores. We want to improve the economy so we kill thousands of whales and their corpses just rot on the docks. AGI / ASI systems can really be extremely dangerous in ways that are extremely difficult to predict, because in their efforts to optimize for what we can measure they optimize away from the good. Corporations are ALSO optimizers, so of course they are optimizing for ‘get money as fast as possible’ — the thing we can measure — despite many of the people building it being like ‘hey yea this is really dangerous.’

But also, there is a massive shadow hanging over this whole thing. If any other government in the history of the United States took this step, there would be good reason to at least give that government the benefit of the doubt. But this government has shown itself to be petty and corrupt in ways that...