Anthropic Blocks Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for Non-Americans: What Happened and Why It Matters for Europe
On Friday 12 June, Anthropic — one of the leading AI companies, led by Dario Amodei — suddenly closed Fable 5 and Mythos to non-American citizens.
The decision was made after the company was forced to do so after an executive order from the American government. Apparently, the call was made after Amazon's CEO, Andy Jassy, raised concerns that Fable 5 could pose as a cyber threat to retrieve information.
This situation created many discussions among many investors and leaders on AI sovereignty. Indeed, Fable 5 is unavailable outside the US territories, even if you are an American citizen living in Europe, for example. More surprisingly, Amazon is one of the top investors of Anthropic, investing almost 13 billion of dollars since 2023.
The development of Mythos by Anthropic
Firstly, all started when Anthropic announced in April 2026 the release of its new model: Claude Mythos. It has been presented as the most capable model of Anthropic's line-up.
Although described as "general purpose," Claude Mythos performs particularly well in two specific areas — cybersecurity and biological research — alongside broader gains in coding and reasoning. Notably, it wasn't trained specifically for either domain: according to Anthropic, these capabilities emerged as a downstream effect of general improvements to the model's coding and reasoning abilities, rather than from targeted training.
Citing the risk that these capabilities could be misused, Anthropic decided that the model would not go to public release and be accessible for all. Instead, the AI company would reserve Claude Mythos only for trusted partners!
Later on, Anthropic released Fable 5, on June 9th — a derived version of Claude Mythos that it kind of bridled but made accessible for all. Despite the restraint, it landed as Anthropic's strongest public release yet — scoring more than 10% higher than Opus 4.8 on some benchmarks, with Anthropic citing exceptional performance across software engineering and knowledge work.
Anthropic then restricts Fable 5 outside the US, barely after three days after the launch
On Friday 12th June, many users were surprised to see on the home page, a alert message saying: Fable 5 is unavailable. No explanation at all, but the answer was elsewhere...
Anthropic has indeed decided to suspend the access to Fable 5 and Mythos as well to any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
This move followed an US executive order from the US government, citing national security authorities without any detailed explanation. In response, Anthropic gave information on the process of identifying potential vulnerabilities. They believe the US government raised concerns about national security of potential risks of bypassing Fable 5 to have access to classified data
In Europe, the anger grows
The most affected entity is Anthropic itself: the company had developed Fable 5 to attract new investors, finance further AI research, and confirm its leadership in the AI race. This came just as Anthropic had confidentially filed for an IPO.
For Europe, the Fable 5 shutdown exposed a vulnerability that goes well beyond one model or one company. Europe may have the world's most developed AI rulebook with AI act, but it remains dependent on foreign model providers, foreign cloud infrastructure, and foreign hardware supply chains, and a sudden US order restricting access showed how quickly that dependence can turn into a liability.
EU leaders have grown increasingly worried that dependence on technologies from foreign providers could be "weaponised" against Europeans. As one outlet put it, the shutdown reignited calls across Europe for "sovereign AI" — the idea that countries should control the models, computing infrastructure, and data underpinning the technology, rather than depend on systems that a foreign government can restrict or withdraw at will.