Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — Anthropic's most powerful models pulled in three days

A launch with record numbers

On June 9, 2026, Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 — the company's new flagship in the so-called Mythos class. And the numbers were nothing short of staggering. Stripe reported that Fable 5 compressed months of work into days, migrating a 50-million-line codebase in a single day — something an entire team would otherwise have needed two months for.

Alongside Fable 5 came Mythos 5, the same underlying model but with certain safety guardrails lifted. It was initially made available only to cybersecurity professionals and critical infrastructure providers through Project Glasswing.

What the models could actually do

This was no marginal update. Fable 5 took top scores on several heavyweight benchmarks — Cognition's FrontierCode, Hebbia's Finance Benchmark and multiple tests in physics and analytics.

• Software engineering: handled entire codebases autonomously and at a completely new speed
• Vision: extracted precise numbers from scientific figures and rebuilt web apps directly from screenshots
• Research: Mythos 5 accelerated protein design roughly 10x, and scientists preferred the model's molecular biology hypotheses in 80% of cases in blind tests

All of this at a price of $10 per million input tokens — less than half the cost of its predecessor.

Then came the directive

Here the story takes an unexpected turn. Late on Friday, June 12, at 5:21 PM ET, Anthropic received a directive from the U.S. government citing national security. The content: block access for all foreign nationals — both inside and outside the United States, including Anthropic's own employees.

Because the company cannot separate foreign users from the rest in real time, the result was a worldwide shutoff of both models. Anthropic's understanding is that the government believes it has found a way to bypass — "jailbreak" — Fable 5.

The first time an AI model is taken down on government orders

All of Anthropic's other models remain online. But this is believed to be the first time a leading AI company has taken a publicly deployed model offline following direct intervention from the federal government.

It says something about where we are. AI has gone from tech product to national security matter — in three days. The question is no longer just what the models can do, but who is allowed to use them.