Anthropic's Fable AI was shut down in 48 hours
Fable 5 fascio
Entrepreneur, Founder, Mentor. Also runs a Registered NGO. Visit my website: sandeepgokhale.com
What is Claude Fable 5 and why did it matter?
June 10th, 2026 will be remembered for a long time. Anthropic released the first mythos level model, Fable. Same frameworks as Mythos with few lesser safeguards in certain areas.
I clearly remember, it was around 5:30 AM and I wanted to dive into it right away. Due to work schedule, I thought ill move it to the weekend, since it was annouced that MAX users ( I am on $100 sub) will get access until June 22nd. That was plenty of time.
One thing was very clear with Fable, it was 5 times more expensive than the current expensive model (Opus 4.8).
$5 for 1Million Input tokens and $25 for 1Million Output tokens, Clearly not something you want to spend on critical stuff.
US government orders Anthropic to suspend Fable
2 days after (June 12th, 5:21pm EST), the whole world woke up to a sudden announcement from the US Govt citing national security concern and to immediately remove access to Fable and Mythos access to everyone.
Anthropic has no other choice. In fact, they are in a way responsible for this. They kept drumming about Government should be able to regulate if models becomes dangerous and they should watch how AI development happens, Pause AI development and what not. Not judging here.
Announcement from anthropic after pulling back the model:
We are suspending access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5. We apologize for this disruption to our customers and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Why was Fable really shut down ?
It's all happening as I type but seems a team within AWS was able to jail break the model and Govt. was informed about this.
A later Statement from Anthropic
Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.
What could all this mean?
All this happening in the last 48 hours could mean a few things.
A marketing Gimick - Anthropic is close to the Trillion Dollar IPO.
Less likely since AWS is probably involved ( Yes, AWS have their own model, Nova but its no way close to Claude).
One interesting note: AWS is also an investor for Anthropic.
Fable access could be restored soon.
- Extra time extended to try it? Price Reduced? Limits reset?
A disaster averted?
Amazon found something and they alerted.
US realized this could mean more harm in the wrong hands.
US is saving the world
US Govt showing who is the BOSS.
It could be to Anthropic
It could be a soft message to every non US person.
A lot of people who developed the very model cannot use it.
India's AI access problem
India is a great country. A country where majority of the population is young and hungry to grow/succeed.
No other democracy on earth has this unique combination of Scale, Youth, Literacy, Digital Infrastructure, and an amazing history to back all this.
Some of the recent events have impacted us Indian quite a lot. Last few months, it was the WAR, now it the AI (Different but same).
Data is the new oil and AI is the new electricity.
The War for Oil
Thanks to straight of hormuz, we are already suffering from:
Unavailability of LPG (Impacting every Indian)
Fuel price hike (it's ₹ 110 in Bengaluru today)
Unavailability of Fertilisers to our farmers.
Price Hike in everything.
Any countless more..
The War for AI/Compute
Now, with the Fable 5 being cut off, one thing is very clear:
Access to Frontier models can be restricted/declined for ANY reason.
This could be done to gain:
Supremacy over others.
Or Geopolitical Show off.
Or kill the competition.
Whatever is the case, right now we Indians are impacted.
Remember Dhurandhar Movie? This is the movement where a agent walks inside the hijacked flight, has zero powers and is agreeing to everything being demanded.
The new India
What most people quickly forget is, this is the New India. Every time someone pushes India to the wall, India punches back harder than anyone expected.
Let's look at some numbers:
Moon mission Cost:
US Maven (2014) - $671 Mil.
India's Magalyaan(2014) - $71 Mil (90% Cheaper)
Karnataka's (Gruha Lakshmi) Free cash to women budget
- Just for FY 25-25, the budget allocated was ~$3B ($1 = ₹95.41)
India is the #2 consumer of AI globally
Open Free access
All our data was/is used to build these frontier models.
China on the other hand
Does NOT allow access to OpenAI/Anthropic models (and so no training data).
DeepSeek and Qwen are the outcome.
DeepSeek R1 only needed $6M. (90% lesser cost).
Chandrayaan-3 (2023) budget was $75M = 12+ Deep Seek R1s.
One year of Karnataka's FREE CASH transfers = 30 frontier models
What this teaches us? Nothing new though.
Never get locked to a single vendor.
Open Source is the way to go.
Prefer locally hosted models.
Indian home grown LMMs (like Sarvam or may be even krutrim) will flourish.
Can India build its own frontier AI model?
No doubts about this one. A top frontier model that is both capable and affordable will come from India. We have the talent, the compute and the money.
It's only a matter of time.
