Fable Retraction

Trump just shut down Anthropic's latest model and banned foreigners from using it. Will nationalism destroy the AI boom?

Trump waited until after Wall Street closed on Friday to drop his biggest bomb of the week.

It's a bomb that killed — at least temporarily — the most powerful AI model on the market.

But the aftershocks could affect the entire AI industry.

Here's what happened.

As Anthropic announced yesterday evening:

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

Fable 5 had been released just 3 days earlier, with Anthropic calling it a "Mythos-class model with safeguards that make it ready for general use." (Mythos being the "scary" new model capable of wreaking havoc on the internet, major companies, and national defense that Anthropic had released to only a few trusted users back in April.)

According to Anthropic, the reason for Trump's "export control directive" was dubious. (According the The Wall Street Journal, Amazon researchers were the narcs.)

Anthropic says it was given only "verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak" which, according to them, was a pre-existing capability also available in models such as OpenAI's Chat GPT 5.5.

The immediate effect of Trump's directive was the sudden government shutdown of a much-hyped model even as users were in the midst of burning lots of money on projects they hadn't previously been able to brag on X about.

But by citing "national security" and explicitly banning foreign nationals worldwide from using Fable 5 — including the Anthropic employees who had helped develop it — Trump has potentially created massive turmoil in the one sector on which the whole U.S. economy now depends.

Some questions to ponder before the market re-opens

• Will nationalism destroy the AI boom? If foreign workers can no longer work on frontier models, could that alone pop the AI bubble?
• Is AI a tool for all or a weapon for the few? If national security trumps everything, are frontier AI companies destined to become arms of the state? Will the broligarchy control everything?
• How will the industry — and the world — respond? Will AI companies start relocating sensitive work outside the U.S.? Will other countries see China as the more predictable partner, or start accelerating their own AI model development?
• Can AI investors trust Trump not to bankrupt them? If the government can shut down a model overnight, how can anyone have faith in the industry meeting its future revenue projections?
• Does Fable 5 prove — and is Trump telling us — the world is not ready for advanced AI? If one alleged jailbreak of a "general use" model can trigger a shutdown, what does that say about the safety of our national defense, financial system, "smart" infrastructure, corporate and medical data, and all the information now stored in the cloud?
• What aren't they telling us? How dangerous are the models that the only the government and the AI companies have access to?

The biggest risk with AI is who controls it

For years, people like Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic have warned us that one of the biggest risks to humanity is the misuse of AI by authoritarian governments.

That was their argument for making sure that America had the best AI models in the world.

Altman and Amodei were promoted as the smartest guys in the field of artificial intelligence.

But were they (or their models) unable to predict how Trump would rule in his second term?

Were they too dumb to foresee that Trump would use every tool at his disposal to destroy our democracy?

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