The Letter · Campbell Hendee

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SectionsA letter fromCampbell HendeeJuly 2026Send this to someone<br>I'm going to tell you that whole story, because I've thought about it every day since. But first, the honest part. I hate writing. This letter took me a month, and I've almost deleted it more times than I can count. I wrote it for my family and my friends, and somewhere in the middle I realized I couldn't keep it that small. Part of it feels like God put this on my heart to share. The rest is simpler: there are real problems starting to form around AI, real opportunities too, and no one I talk to sees the full picture yet. Fair warning: this is not a feel-good letter. Parts of it should scare you. They scared me. This letter is long. Read all of it. If you just thought about saving it for later, you're exactly who I'm talking to. I hate writing and I wrote this anyway. Take the hint. And if you truly only have ten minutes, go read Your job, specifically and The fork, or go read the short version, then come back for the rest. You'll want to.<br>Most people are using AI to look things up, write emails, get through schoolwork. That's not a guess. OpenAI studied over a million ChatGPT conversations and found roughly three quarters were people looking up information, getting practical advice, or getting help writing something. Nothing wrong with that. I used it to help write this letter, and without it I probably would've put my laptop through a wall. But those are the smallest things it can do, and the distance between how the average person uses it and what it's actually capable of is getting enormous.<br>On June 9, a company called Anthropic released a model called Claude Fable 5. Their own announcement said its capabilities passed anything they had ever made available to the public, and the test scores backed that up. And this was not a toy. The guy who runs Anthropic, Dario Amodei, had already written a whole essay about what AI at this level could do. His prediction: take the medical progress we'd normally make over the next 50 to 100 years and cram it into 5 or 10. Eliminating most cancer. He puts the possible drop in cancer deaths at 95 percent or more. Preventing Alzheimer's. Preventing or outright curing most genetic disease, the kind that has wrecked families for generations. He wrote all of that back in 2024, and in the same essay he said AI at that level could arrive as early as 2026.<br>Three days after Fable launched, at 5:21 on a Friday evening, a letter arrived at Anthropic from the U.S. Commerce Department. It ordered the company to cut off every foreign national on earth. Not just people in other countries. Every foreign national anywhere, including Anthropic's own employees. The company got 90 minutes to comply. And since there is no way to check the nationality of hundreds of millions of users in real time, there was exactly one way to comply. Turn it off for everybody. By the end of the night, Fable was dark for every user on the planet. Not slowed down, not limited. Shut off completely.<br>One letter. Ninety minutes. Gone.<br>And be clear about what they turned off. Not a chatbot. The level of machine Amodei said could cram a century of medicine into ten years. Somebody you love is going to get one of those diagnoses. For three days, the thing with a shot at beating it existed. Nobody asked you.<br>The two dates, from the government's own letters<br>June 26: Mythos switched back on for the approved club. July 1: Fable switched back on for the public. The lights came on for the club first.

Both restoration dates are named in the letter above. Anthropic's own timeline of the shutdown and restart.Here's what actually pisses me off. The version they killed, the one you and I could use, was already the fenced-in one. Same brain, most powerful capabilities locked behind safety filters. The version without the fences is called Mythos, and it was never offered to the public at all. Anthropic says on its own website what Mythos can do: find and exploit software vulnerabilities better than any other model, and better than all but the most skilled human security experts alive. That one went to a couple hundred approved organizations. Federal agencies. JPMorgan. Apple, Google, Microsoft. You were never allowed near it. And that doesn't just piss me off. It could be the most dangerous threat to America there is: turning from a healthy capitalist country into a monopoly one.<br>The dates on the government's own letters spell it out. Both versions went dark in June, and they did not come back at the same time. On June 26, a letter from the same Commerce Secretary turned Mythos back on for the approved club. The public got Fable back on July 1. When the lights came back on, they came on for the club before they came on for you.<br>So yes, it's back. Nineteen days after everything went dark, Fable started rolling back out across the world. And I can hear the shrug from here: it was off for nineteen days and your life...