After the Trump administration suspended foreign nationals' access to Anthropic's most advanced AI models, the EU has opened talks with Washington seeking to restore access. Following semiconductors, export controls are now spilling into AI for allied nations, accelerating Europe's debate over "AI sovereignty."
June 25, 2026 · AI Export Controls
US Blocks Foreign Access to Anthropic's Top AI — Then the EU Comes Knocking
A June 12 Commerce Department directive ordered Anthropic to cut off its most advanced models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, from all foreign nationals. Unable to verify nationality in real time, the company disabled both for everyone — and the EU is now in talks with Washington to restore access.
3 days
From launch (Jun 9) to the export ban (Jun 12)
ALL
Users locked out — nationality can't be verified live
80%
Favorable ratings for novel molecular-biology hypotheses
How fast Fable 5 worked
Time to reach the same research milestone — Fable 5 vs GPT-5.5.
Also cited: migrating a 50M-line Ruby codebase in one day · 10× faster drug design.
Pricing
Input $10 / 1M tokens$50 / 1M tokens
Two Models
Fable 5 — general usersMythos 5 — cyber defenders, via Project Glasswing
The stated reason — and the doubts
Commerce cited "national security concerns related to Fable 5 jailbreak techniques" — but provided no detailed evidence.
Anthropic notes rivals like OpenAI's GPT-5.5 have comparable cyber capabilities.
Other models, including Opus 4.8, remain unaffected.
Critics question the legal limits of export controls aimed at a narrow jailbreak risk.
Praise at launch
Agentic coding, long-horizon reasoning, one-shot complex apps. Stripe said months of engineering compressed into days.
Friction & fallout
Conservative safeguards over-flagged harmless requests (<5% fall back to Opus 4.8). The ban strains EU–US alliances and fuels calls for tech sovereignty.
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