Imagine a lead developer in Berlin or a security researcher in Paris ending their Thursday with the most sophisticated coding partner ever built, only to wake up on Friday, June 12, 2026, to a 403 Forbidden error. This was no routine maintenance window or technical glitch; it was a geopolitical foreclosure. Overnight, Anthropic’s “Mythos-class” models, the revolutionary Claude Fable 5 and its internal progenitor, Mythos 5, were silenced across Europe by a direct order from the U.S. government. At PixelUnion, we have long been a voorvechter (advocate) for European technical autonomy, and we view this blackout as the ultimate “canary in the coal mine.” It is a brutal reminder that when you plug into someone else’s power grid, the owner can cut the current without warning.
Let’s buy some more F-35s and deepen our tech dependence on US companies! 🥴 (/s). What a @#$ing waste of money and massive risk that US will brick or seize things bought from US
Anthropic is probably just late on paying Trump the “protection money.”
Something a lot of people seemingly haven’t come to terms with is the fact that the US is a mafia state. Fraud has been decriminalized for any company that pays the vig. You have to do a lot more due diligence on any US company because they can just straight up lie to get investment. There’s no longer any consequences for lying to sucker people into investing in their companies. There wasn’t all that much before, but now there’s none.
Anthropic will pay some bribes and do as Trump wants then they will be allowed to do business with other countries again. But it’s obviously a bad idea to do business with them even after that happens.