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A Blockade on Knowledge. After June 12, Nothing Will Be the Same

Show and Tell

philip-rey

June 14, 2026, 3:39pm

A Blockade on

Knowledge. After June

12, Nothing Will Be the

Same

The most advanced artificial intelligence model was switched off for everyone who is not

American. What used to belong to political fiction became fact on a single Friday evening, and it is

a signal that neither Europe nor China has any right to ignore.

On June 12, 2026, the United States government, citing national security, ordered the company

Anthropic to cut off access to its most powerful models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for anyone who is

not a US citizen, inside the country and beyond it. The company could not carry out this order

directly, because a significant part of its own staff are not Americans. The only way to comply with

the directive was to disable the model for everyone. Fable 5 stopped working two days after its

release.

We cannot wait for an American AGI for everyone, because it will not come. They will not make it

available to the world. They will make it available to their own citizens, and perhaps to a few

satellites. The rest will get access to stripped-down, supervised, severed versions, or nothing at all.

And this is not because the United States is evil. It is because any state that holds such an advantage

will, sooner or later, use it. This is not a question of morality. It is a question of the logic of power.

American elites have spoken for decades about exceptionalism and leadership. They have now

shown what that means in practice: we have the best tool, therefore you cannot have it.

Can we then harbor any illusion that, were an AGI to emerge, the US would not block access to it?

We cannot. Not for a moment. They will block it, immediately, and there will be no appeal. Whether

Fable 5 was a deliberate test or the reflex of a panicked administration is secondary. What matters is

that it functioned as a test, and the result is unambiguous: it proved feasible, unpunished, accepted

by the world without resistance. Now it is known that the same can be done with every model that

follows. Every one. AGI included.

This is no technical formality, nor an isolated incident. It is the first known case in which a federal

government forced a leading artificial intelligence company to withdraw a publicly deployed model.

The precedent has been set, and precedents get repeated.The official reason was a narrow, as it was put, vulnerability, a way of bypassing the model’s

safeguards. Anthropic itself publicly disagreed with the decision. It stated that the same

vulnerability is probably present in other publicly available models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5,

that the evidence had been conveyed only verbally, and that if such a standard were applied across

the industry, it would halt the deployment of all new models. The stated reason therefore does not

account for the scale of the response.

And the logic of the decision is this. Had the danger lain in the tool itself, it would have been cut off

for everyone and in all of its forms. Instead, the same capability remained available in competitors’

models, which no one switched off. The criterion for cutting access was not “dangerous or safe.” It

was “ours or foreign.” And a tool that some may use and others may not, by passport rather than by

risk, is not being restricted for safety. It is being restricted for advantage.

This is why neither Europe nor China can hold any illusions any longer. The message reads: the

most powerful cognitive tools of the age will be granted to one’s own and denied to outsiders, and a

single capital will decide who counts as one’s own. Anyone building their future on the assumption

of permanent access to American models has just seen what that assumption is worth: two days.

And here we reach the heart of the matter, which extends beyond this one decision. The knowledge

that is the raw material of artificial intelligence did not originate in the United States, and did not

originate in any single country. It was built over generations, on every continent, in every language

that has ever recorded a thought. Models are trained on that inheritance in its entirety, because

otherwise they would not be what they are. What we call artificial intelligence is the condensed

effort of humanity, which no single party produced and no single party owns. Newton wrote that he

saw further because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Every AI model stands on the shoulders of

all the giants at once, and that is precisely why it cannot be anyone’s national property.

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