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#001June 27, 2026by361TECH

The model that vanished in an afternoon

How the US government switched off Anthropic's most powerful public model overnight, why it locks out every non-US builder, and my honest take on which AI to actually use right now.

Welcome to issue 01

Quick one this week. One story worth your attention, and one opinion you can argue with.

The model that vanished in an afternoon

On June 9, Anthropic put out Claude Fable 5, the first Mythos-class model anyone could use. Three days later it was gone. Not an outage. The US government sent an export control order, and Anthropic switched the model off for every user on the planet the same evening.

Here is the part that matters for us. The order targeted "foreign nationals," meaning anyone who is not a US citizen, inside or outside the country. Anthropic could not sort users by nationality fast enough, so it pulled the model for everybody. If you build outside the US, like we do, you were not collateral damage. You were the target.

The official reason was a claimed jailbreak of the model's cybersecurity limits. Anthropic disagrees and calls it a misunderstanding, saying the flaws found were minor and that other public models can find the same ones.

Where things stand as I write this (June 27): still down for the public. The government just allowed a narrow comeback for Mythos 5, the locked-down sibling, but only for around a hundred US organizations defending critical infrastructure. Fable 5, the one normal people could use, is not back. Talks are happening over the weekend. There is an ID and biometric check coming on July 8 that looks like the route to a US-only return. Whether the rest of us get it back, and in what form, nobody can tell you yet.

The lesson is the cheap one to learn now instead of the hard way later. If your product calls one model by name, and that model can disappear in an afternoon for reasons you do not control, you do not have a product. You have a dependency. Build a way to swap models with a config change, not a rewrite. Especially if you are not American.

What I actually use (and you can fight me on it)

No tool is best at everything. Here is how I split mine.

ChatGPT for daily stuff and images. It is the one I open without thinking, and it is still the most fun for generating images.

Gemini for thinking out loud. When I want to brainstorm or just talk something through, it is the one that keeps up best.

Claude Code for building. For actual coding, nothing else is close right now. If you write software and you have not tried it, that is the one to test this week.

That is it. Pick the right tool for the job instead of forcing one to do all three.

See you in the next one.

Sources

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