The Briefing RoomJune 18, 2026via The Verge AI
Who decides when AI is too dangerous?
Why it matters
The Fable 5 export controls reveal a chaotic, personality-driven AI regulatory approach where government leverage over model access depends less on technical risk and more on CEO political capital. This sets a dangerous precedent for how frontier AI will be governed—unpredictable, vindictive, and divorced from evidence.
Key signals
- Anthropic pulled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline after Trump administration issued 90-minute ultimatum on June 13, 2026
- Export controls restrict all foreign nationals (including Anthropic employees) from accessing both models
- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy allegedly escalated internal red team findings to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, triggering administration action
- Sources say Dario Amodei did not immediately respond to initial calls; took 1 hour 15 minutes vs. Anthropic team's 15 minutes
- Alleged jailbreak capabilities in Fable 5 are reportedly achievable in OpenAI's GPT-5.5, yet only Anthropic faced enforcement
- Anthropic has existing supply chain risk designation from DoD; ongoing lawsuit with Trump administration over military use restrictions
- Administration rationale has shifted multiple times: China access rumor (unverified, from weeks prior), executive order non-compliance (order not yet in effect), and alleged jailbreak vulnerability
- Biden-era AI executive order (transparency reviews, research requirements for frontier models) was rescinded by Trump but may be partially reinstated
- Cybersecurity leaders published open letter opposing the regulatory approach: 'If you regulate, this is not the way'
- Industry sources report backup contracts with non-US companies and open-weight model deployments are now underway as political risk mitigation
- Sam Altman (OpenAI) maintains press relationships with Trump; Sundar Pichai (Google) attended inauguration; Mark Zuckerberg attended UFC event with Trump
The hook
NOBODY TALKING about this: While every AI CEO courts Trump, Anthropic—the company that warned us AI was dangerous—just got its model banned. And it might not be about safety at all.
On today’s episode of Decoder, my guest is Hayden Field, senior AI reporter for The Verge. Often when Hayden comes on the show, it’s because something has gone wrong in the world of AI. Last weekend, that something was a pretty intense mix of Anthropic, the Trump administration, and Anthropic’s new AI model, Fable 5.
On Friday, not even a week since Anthropic released Fable to the public, the US government said it was imposing export controls on the new model, as well as the underlying Mythos model that Fable is based on. Those controls restricted foreign nationals, even those working for Anthropic in the United States, from accessing these models. Anthropic then took Fable and Mythos offline for everyone, because the company said it was worried it would not be able to restrict access and reasonably comply with the order otherwise.
As you might imagine, this is all a giant mess. Hayden actually just published a fantastic play-by-play on The Verge about how this all went down last Friday and the scramble through the weekend from both sides to figure out what exactly happened and how it might get resolved. So I wanted her to come on and just walk me through the timeline and what it all means.
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The situation is ongoing. As of Tuesday when we’re recording this episode, Fable is still offline — in fact, if you boot up Claude, it tells you right above the chatbox window that “Fable 5 is currently unavailable.” Yet as you’ll hear Hayden explain, whether Fable comes back online this week or not, the ripple effects of the government’s feud with Anthropic have far-reaching consequences for the tech industry and the US’s AI regulatory regime.
There’s also a big irony here, and you’ll hear Hayden and me get into that, too: Anthropic has spent years arguing that AI might soon be powerful enough to be dangerous — and t...