June 20, 2026
The Week the Kill Switch Got Two Hands on It
In one week of June 2026, Anthropic quietly throttled its record-breaking Claude Fable 5 for AI researchers, then the U.S. Commerce Department forced Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline worldwide via an export-control letter. The episode proved a frontier AI model is a strategic asset that can be pulled away overnight — by its maker or by the state.