On Friday June 12, at 5:21pm ET, the US government handed Anthropic an export-control directive: cut off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, anywhere, in the country or out, including Anthropic’s own foreign-national staff. You can’t check the passport of hundreds of millions of users in real time, so Anthropic did the only compliant thing and pulled both models for everybody. Its statement pinned it on “the US government, citing national security authorities.” NBC named Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and the Bureau of Industry and Security; Bloomberg later published the letter. Anthropic says it disagrees and chalks the whole thing up to a misunderstanding. It notes the same capability is sitting in other models anyway, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 included, and swears it’ll restore access as soon as it can. It stayed dark for weeks.
That same week, look what the internet did. A pile of people on X invented Le Chaton Fat — a giant open model, very French, with an infinite context window measured in croissants. Forget the benchmarks. What stuck was the fantasy: a sovereign European model nobody could switch off. It landed because a real one had just been switched off, on a Friday afternoon, by order.
Here’s the part that isn’t a joke. When a government can reach in and kill your tools overnight, open weights stop being a nerd preference. That’s just what ownership means now. Mistral’s Arthur Mensch put it cold while teasing his own open model: “you cannot own, inspect, audit, or improve a system you are only permitted to reach through someone else’s interface.” A fat cat that lives on your own hard drive doesn’t take orders from Commerce. That’s why the fake one felt more real than the thing you were paying for.