(NEW YORK)‑‑On June 12, the U.S. Commerce Department issued a sudden order that forced Anthropic to cut off access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals, including its own staff. Overnight, a commercial AI product became a national security issue. On June 26, the government eased the order a bit, letting Mythos 5 reach a small group of approved U.S. companies and agencies.
On June 30, Commerce dropped the export controls entirely. Anthropic began restoring Fable 5 to all users this week, added new cybersecurity safeguards, and is still expanding Mythos access through its Glasswing security program.
The standoff is over now. But what it revealed about how these systems are controlled is still worth thinking about.
This whole event showed that access to a top AI model can depend on one letter from an agency that had no part in building or buying it, based on security concerns that were never fully explained and jailbreak claims that are still disputed. For any company that leans on these tools to run its business, this is not just a headline. It is proof that a core system can be shut off in hours, no matter what any contract promises.
The timing also matters. While Anthropic worked through weeks of talks with Washington, rival labs kept shipping, and open source developers overseas kept closing the gap. A single policy call did not just pause one company. It shifted the pace of the entire race, which is exactly the kind of outcome that worries anyone trying to build on a system they do not fully control.
At Next Realm AI, we still study and use leading systems including Claude, GPT 5, Gemini, and top Chinese models, because they remain the best tools for many jobs. But as Tom Bustamante the Founder & CEO of Next Realm AI puts it, “When one order can turn off a major model for the whole world, it shows how much power sits in a few hands. Our work on decentralized AI is not about hype. It is about building systems where no government, lab, or cloud provider can quietly decide which minds are allowed to run.”
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