AI sovereignty hawks see red as U.S. moves to block Mythos, Fable models

Published 13 June 2026 · india

The U.S.’s abrupt decision to restrict access to AI firm Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable large language models is leading an “I told you so” moment

The U.S.’s abrupt decision to restrict access to AI firm Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable large language models is leading an “I told you so” moment for national security hawks within the government, who have dealt for months with skepticism and sparse resources in supporting sovereign efforts to develop an Indian AI stack. “Globalisation is dead, and Bharat must find its own way ahead,” declared Sridhar Vembu, the founder of Zoho and a member of India’s Security Advisory Board (NSAB), on X shortly after Anthropic announces the export controls. “What can our government do right now? Ensure that organisations in India embrace smaller models, both Indian and Chinese open-source ones. With a bit of effort, we can make them work. Anyway, why pay money to people who don’t even want to sell to you?” This is big: all access to Mythos and Fable AI models disabled for everyone outside America. First thoughts 1. Technology is the ultimate weapon. sovereignty, national security, all of it is now about technology. 2. Globalization is dead and Bharat must find her… Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) June 13, 2026 The U.S. government ordered Anthropic to disable Mythos and Fable access for non-U.S. nationals, even within its own company, on Friday evening (early Saturday morning in India). Mythos is a model that Anthropic claims has been highly accomplished in finding and patching cybersecurity vulnerabilities that even human researchers have missed over decades. Amid concerns that AI-generated cyberattacks may be a threat to Indian companies and government entities, India sought access to Mythos, and some entities joined the so-called Project Glasswing to gain some access earlier this month.

That access may now be disrupted. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Ministry of External Affairs, which have been in touch with Anthropic and the U.S. government regarding Project Glasswing, did not respond to queries from The Hindu. Additionally, the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), which reportedly gained access to Mythos this month, along with the cybersecurity agency CERT-in, which operates under MeitY, also did not respond. Even some less cybersecurity-focused projects are experiencing disruptions due to the U.S. move. The restriction of Fable, which has been available for all paying users of Claude, had immediate fallout on Saturday. For instance, Vikram Chandra, an entrepreneur and journalist, said on X, “I have projects that were to run on Fable today – and they will come to a grinding halt... Yes, guardrails for frontier AI are essential – and Anthropic itself has argued for them. But creating national barriers isn’t the solution.” India’s capabilities to train a frontier AI model lag behind those of China, which itself is a few steps behind the U.S. While Beijing is home to firms like DeepSeek, which use slightly older graphics processing units (GPUs) in large quantities, with abundant access to data centre capacity and electricity, to try to catch up to the more efficient U.S. models made by firms like Anthropic and ChatGPT, India has a relatively limited capacity of such resources to train large language models (LLMs) like Claude’s Opus, Mythos, and Fable. While a hypothetical Indian alternative to Mythos wouldn’t be subject to abrupt geopolitical interruptions, actually creating such an LLM is dependent on the availability of abundant quantities of expensive AI chips from firms like Nvidia, data centre capacity, and electricity availability to boot.