Fable Comes Back Smaller

Eight days into the blackout, the safe move is to refuse a date. Anthropic says it's working to restore access; the administration, speaking through the usual unnamed officials, signals only that the models can come back once its concerns are met. Both lines are built to expire without anyone being caught wrong. Since the ask was for dates, here are mine, with the reasoning attached so you can mark them off against the calendar.

Start with the near term. June 22 and 23 come and go with Fable still dark. The subscription cutoff was always a capacity story, the free window closing and usage credits taking over on the 23rd, but you can't bill credits against a model nobody can reach. So the transition quietly slips and Anthropic says nothing about it, which is the tell that the date moved without a press release.

Now the restart itself. I'll put real weight on Fable returning for US-verified users before July 10, and probably before the July 4 weekend, because both sides want this closed. Anthropic has a public listing ahead and cannot carry "Washington can darken our best product over a weekend" as a live, unresolved fact in front of bankers. The administration has made its point and gains little from a prolonged siege of a company it would rather keep onside. The standoff that The New Stack summed up as "the ball is in Anthropic's court" resolves the way these usually do: a phone call, a vague joint line about cooperation, the model back up.

It comes back diminished. Foreign-national access returns last, or under geofencing that doesn't really work, or not at all on the old terms. New friction ships with it: attestations, the thirty-day pre-release look the executive order already wants.

Why those terms stick is the part worth spelling out. David Sacks has cast the standoff as Anthropic refusing to fix a jailbreak, and that framing does real work whether or not it holds up. It turns a corporate dispute into a compliance failure, and a compliance failure is what lets Washington set the conditions for return instead of leaving them to Anthropic. Whatever comes back will wear those conditions.

So the dates, plainly: nothing before the 22nd, the credit transition fudged, Fable back for American users in early July, full restoration for everyone else slow and conditional or never on the original footing. If I'm wrong, the likelier direction is slower, not faster. An unwritten power has no deadline forcing its hand, which is the whole reason nobody wrote it down.

The one I'd most like to miss on is that last clause. A model that returns on a regulator's terms isn't really the model that launched on June 9. It's the same weights wearing a permission slip, and the permission slip is the part that outlasts this news cycle.

Sources:

Fable 5 and Mythos 5 remain suspended: "The ball is in Anthropic's court" — The New Stack

Anthropic Disabled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 After a U.S. Export-Control Order. Here's What Happened — Forbes

Anthropic Is Still at Odds With the White House Over Claude Fable 5 — WIRED

Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 is a version of Mythos the public can access today — TechCrunch