Nobody in Canberra has stood up and said “we’re banning VPNs.” They don’t have to. If you’ve watched how this government operates, you already know where this is heading. The under-16 social media ban kicked in back in December. TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, all of them now have to take “reasonable steps” to keep kids off, or cop fines up to $49.5 million. Fine. Whatever you think of the policy, that’s the law now.
Someone has registered isfable5back.com. The whole site is one word, “No,” with a little timer counting how long the best coding model anyone’s used has been switched off. A week now. I check it more than I’d like to admit. If you missed it, the US Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to cut off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national on the 12th, at 5:21pm Eastern, citing national security. There’s no clean way to tell a foreign national from a US person across a few hundred million accounts on a Friday afternoon, so Anthropic did the only thing it could and pulled both models for everyone. I wrote about the politics of that already, the part where Dario spent months asking for exactly this power and then got hit with it. This post is the more selfish question. The one every developer who’d built Fable 5 into their day is actually asking. Is it coming back, and when it does, will it still be the thing we lost?
On the 10th of June, Dario Amodei published an essay arguing that governments should have the legal power to block dangerous AI deployments. Two days later, on the 12th at 5:21pm Eastern, the US Commerce Department used that exact power on him. It ordered Anthropic to cut off all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, anywhere in the world, citing national security. There was no way to comply selectively, so Anthropic pulled both models for everyone, paying customers included.