According to the latest update, frankly, I’m as much in the dark as you are. What’s the real story behind the sudden ban Friday of Claude Fable and Mythos, Anthropic’s most powerful AI models?
The report highlights that eastern time on Friday, I’d been using Fable in Claude Code for help on a personal project, and when I woke Saturday morning, there was a big banner in the app saying that Fable was unavailable. What I do know is that as late as 5 p.m.
In a fresh development, government, citing national security risks, ordered the publisher to restrict access to the models by “any foreign national,” including even Anthropic employees. Anthropic, as we all know by now, yanked Fable and Mythos for all users on Friday after the U.S.
In a fresh development, for its part, Anthropic has argued that the government’s concerns about Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are overblown, and that the potential Fable 5 “jailbreaking” method that spooked the White House is “narrow” and “non-universal.” Anthropic officials have reportedly traveled to Washington to negotiate an end to the ban.
As part of the ongoing story, there’s also been chatter that groups in China got hold of the models. There’s also been talk the ban came about after Amazon, a major Anthropic backer, had warned government officials that Fable and Mythos posed serious cybersecurity threats.
In a fresh development, good question, and I think we’re a long way from getting any definitive answers. So, are Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models really threats to national security, or is the ban just another move in the ongoing dispute between Anthropic and the White House?
In a fresh development, in the meantime, where does the Anthropic ban leave everyday AI users?
In a fresh development, you won’t get the same quality of work, of course, although Fable-level power is arguably overkill for anything but the most compute-intensive tasks. Practically speaking, anyone who was using Fable 5 (the only Mythos-class model that had been in general drop) can still downshift to the next most powerful Claude model, Opus 4.8, without having to start another chat or coding session.
As part of the ongoing story, still, the Fable ban reminded me of other situations where a policy and/or technology change by an AI provider managed to break a workflow I’d been relying on, forcing me to scramble for stop-gap solutions.
According to the latest update, that way, if ChatGPT suffers an outage (it happens!), I can always jump to Claude or Gemini. One measure I’ve taken to safeguard myself against AI failures is to maintain $20-a-month subscriptions to the big three (ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) rather than going all-in with a $100-a-month or more plan for any one of them, not to mention my own collection of local AI models.
As part of the ongoing story, indeed, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney alluded to the “danger of over-reliance on certain models” when discussing the Anthropic ban, adding that “we will have done something wrong” if we “don’t take the lesson, don’t build out and diversify.” While Carney was speaking more in worldwide terms, the same lesson applies to everyday AI users like you and me.
According to the latest update, just ask anyone who’s been locked out of their Gmail inbox. And while many of us have yet to become truly dependent on any one AI tool or service, it’s easy to see a time when a ChatGPT or Claude subscription becomes as crucial as a Google account — and when that happens, it pays to have a contingency plan.
As part of the ongoing story, his coverage of artificial intelligence interrogates the most recent LLMs, and how they can be used at work and at home to be best prepared for the AI revolution. “AI is going to change our lives sooner than we think,” Ben writes. “Our best way to adapt is by using it every day.” Ben has been a PCWorld author since 2014, and has covered everything from laptops to security cameras before launching PCWorld’s AI beat. Ben's articles have also appeared in PC Magazine, TIME, Wired, CNET, Men's Fitness, Mobile Magazine, and more. Ben holds a master's degree in English literature. Ben has been writing about consumer technology for more than 20 years, and now focuses his reporting on AI as it relates to the basic human experience.