Claude Fable 5 was live for three days.
It launched on June 9, 2026. By June 12 at 5:21 PM Eastern Time, it was off. And as of June 16, it is still off — for every user, everywhere in the world. Mythos 5 was turned off at the same time for the same reason.
If you have been getting a "currently unavailable" error, this is why.
The short version
The US Commerce Department, signed by Secretary Howard Lutnick, sent Anthropic an export-control order on June 12. The order requires Anthropic to block access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, including their own non-US employees.
Anthropic has no way to check, in real time, which user is from which country. So they did the only thing they could to comply — turn the models off for everyone. In their own words:
"We must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance."
What the government said was the problem
The order cited "national security authorities" and pointed at a method to "jailbreak" Fable 5. According to administration officials quoted by reporters, another company demonstrated the jailbreak to the government, and that "alarmed the administration about possible national security risks."
The jailbreak itself, as Anthropic describes it, "essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws." In plain English — someone asked Claude to look at software code and find the security bugs in it.
Anthropic pushed back. They called the technique "narrow and non-universal" and pointed out that OpenAI's GPT-5.5 can do the same thing without needing any trick. Their position is that this should not require shutting down the entire model.
When is Fable 5 coming back?
Nobody has said. Anthropic says they "believe this is a misunderstanding" and are "working to restore access as soon as possible." As of June 16, there is no timeline.
If your code used claude-fable-5, switch to claude-opus-4-8 as the closest substitute. Sonnet 4.6 and Haiku 4.5 are cheaper alternatives that still work fine.
Full guide
I wrote a longer breakdown with the day-by-day timeline, a 5-step migration playbook, what to do if you built on Fable 5, and the open questions about when (or if) it comes back.
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