Anthropic restored Fable 5, but not for foreigners. Mythos remains offline, and the claim it "breached the NSA" is distorted

Nearly a week after a global outage, American company Anthropic has restored its public model Fable 5 — but with nationality checks on users and stricter automatic fallback to a weaker backup model, while its more powerful, closed Mythos 5 remains out of service. Meanwhile, it has emerged what triggered the US government's intervention: at a US Senate hearing it was stated that Mythos "penetrated nearly all of NSA's classified systems within hours" — but officials quickly qualified this dramatic claim into a far tamer reality. And while Washington has not officially disclosed its reasons, Europe is turning the shock into a procurement argument, all as Anthropic's autumn IPO looms with a valuation near a trillion dollars.

🔴 Latest developments (June 27)

• 27.06.The US government has allowed the release of Mythos to select companies. According to The Hill, the federal government has granted a narrow circle of companies access to the closed Mythos 5 model — after weeks, the model is thus no longer completely out of service, though it remains unavailable to the public. The Hill ↗

"Breached the NSA within hours" — what really happened

Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, at the June 11 hearing quoted NSA chief General Joshua Rudd as saying Mythos got "into nearly all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours." This sentence became a media shorthand meant to explain why the government halted the models — but it distorts reality. Tom's Hardware ↗

The catch lies in what followed. Officials clarified to the New York Times and the Associated Press that this was a controlled security test in which the intelligence agencies themselves ran Mythos against their own systems — not an external breach, and no one claims a real system was compromised. The model "discovered" vulnerabilities within hours, but that is not the same as exploiting them in that time. The tests also started from inside air-gapped networks, making them weak evidence of a "breach from outside." The Next Web ↗

Mythos was given only to vetted partners through the controlled-access program Project Glasswing, while Fable was the public version of the same class of models. The shutdown order came a day after the Senate hearing. Anthropic itself has maintained from the start that the government showed it only oral evidence of a narrow, non-universal bypass of safeguards, which revealed "a small number of already-known, minor vulnerabilities." We covered the full original context in our report on the models' shutdown. Anthropic ↗

Fable is back, curtailed; Mythos remains offline

The return is only partial. According to tech media, the public Fable 5 returned around June 18, six days after the global outage, but with nationality-based access checks and fallback switching to the weaker Opus 4.8 model, which developers say now triggers more often than before the outage — especially on topics involving cybersecurity, chemistry, and biology. The more powerful Mythos 5 remains unavailable, reserved solely for partners in the Glasswing program. Business Insider ↗

That is precisely why "restoration" does not mean everyone can see the models. Since access to Fable 5 is now verified by nationality, a user outside the US — including in Europe and Slovakia — may find the model still blocked for them. Moreover, the company's original statement about suspending access remains on its website, so from Europe the whole case looks more like an ongoing outage than a resolved episode. Anthropic ↗

Anthropic's head of international markets, Chris Ciauri, said at a press conference in Seoul that the company expected the models to return "in the coming days," but declined to answer most questions about the shutdown. Korea JoongAng Daily ↗

Legally, according to legal analysis, the agency's order likely rests on an "Is Informed" letter from the Bureau of Industry and Security under the Export Control Reform Act of 2018, which requires an individual export license before any non-US national can access the model. The agency has not officially disclosed the reason or legal basis, so this remains an expert estimate. Just Security ↗

For some experts, this is precisely the core of the problem. Tech Policy Press reads the case as a precedent — supposedly the first time Washington has used export control as a remote kill switch on a commercial product already running at companies and institutions around the world. Tech Policy Press ↗

Europe: from "wake-up call" to order

In Europe, rhetoric about digital sovereignty quickly turned into concrete steps. Attention turned to France's Mistral, which according to Fortune is negotiating to raise $3.5 billion at a valuation of $23.2 billion. Fortune ↗ Its pitch — open-weight models that customers run on their own infrastructure, which no outside party can switch off — has stopped being a slogan and become a procurement argument. The Next Web ↗

Politics has joined in too. On June 3, the European Commission unveiled a Technology Sovereignty Package that, according to Fortune, is meant to channel €422 billion into chips, data centers, and cloud. Critics, however, point out that strong European standards would apply to only about a tenth of cloud contracts. In Britain, meanwhile, lawmakers pointed out that local hospitals and researchers lost access to Fable 5. Fortune ↗

According to Al Jazeera, the dispute is also straining alliance relations. But there is also a more sober view: some analysts warn the case is more a hole in risk management than proof that Europe can be permanently "cut off" — the models remained partly available even during the dispute, and the problem is a missing rule, not technical dependency as such. Al Jazeera ↗ IAPP ↗

A trillion-dollar IPO hangs in the balance

The timing could not have been worse for Anthropic. The company confidentially filed for an IPO (Form S-1) in early June, following a funding round at a valuation of around $965 billion, and is expected to go public no earlier than this autumn — according to specialized trackers, in October. But the flagship models' outage has delayed expected revenue from Mythos and added regulatory uncertainty that investors dislike seeing. The coming weeks will thus show whether the world's most valuable startup can return to full operation before it goes public. IPOs.fyi ↗