The government torpedoed Anthropic’s newest, most powerful model. Sources tell The Verge that the AI lab and other AI boosters spent the weekend trying to explain that Fable 5 wasn’t too powerful.

As the rest of the country celebrated the USA’s first World Cup win and the New York Knicks championship, Anthropic spent its weekend fighting the Trump administration over its latest model release. At 5:21 PM on Friday, the company received a US export control directive to suspend access to its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 AI models by “any foreign national” inside or outside the US, “including foreign national Anthropic employees.” The only way that was possible, Anthropic determined, was to completely disable products it spent the past week hyping — and travel to Washington, DC in hopes of changing President Donald Trump’s mind. Now, over the coming days, the US government could dramatically alter the trajectory of the entire industry, dealing a major blow to American AI companies.

Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5 are built on the same foundation as Anthropic’s Mythos Preview, which Anthropic dubbed too dangerous to publicly release. (The company’s warnings could be seen as genuine concern or more hype for their own model — or both.) Mythos 5 was made available to a select group of government agencies and companies, while Fable 5, which featured additional safeguards, was deemed “safe for general use.” But when a report indicated those guardrails may have failed, Anthropic’s dire warnings about Mythos falling into the wrong hands came back to haunt it.

A source familiar with the situation, who participated in the negotiations between Anthropic and the Trump administration, said the administration called the AI lab on Friday around 1pm ET and gave the company a 90-minute ultimatum to shut down access to Mythos 5 and Fable 5. If it didn’t, then the government would impose export controls on Anthropic by authority of the US Commerce Department.

The source said that Anthropic executives were talking to the White House within 15 minutes of that first call, confirming that CEO Dario Amodei joined the discussions about an hour and 15 minutes after that initial call. Amodei directly spoke with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, in some cases more than once, the source confirmed.

Anthropic wrote in a release on Friday that the company believed that the government “believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5.” Rather than an existential threat, though, Anthropic said that the jailbreak in question was a “potential narrow, non-universal” one that was “shared with the government” by an entity the company declined to name. Moreover, Anthropic said the behavior wasn’t unique to Fable 5. “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),” Anthropic wrote.