A Blockade on Knowledge. After June 12, Nothing Will Be the Same

On June 12, 2026, the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to cut off access to its advanced AI models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for non-U.S. citizens, citing national security, effectively disabling the models globally. The move sets a precedent for restricting AI access by nationality, signaling that the U.S. may block future AGI from international use.

A Blockade on Knowledge. After June 12, Nothing Will Be the Same The most advanced artificial intelligence model was switched off for everyone who is not American. What used to belong to political fiction became fact on a single Friday evening, and it is a signal that neither Europe nor China has any right to ignore. On June 12, 2026, the United States government, citing national security, ordered the company Anthropic to cut off access to its most powerful models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for anyone who is not a US citizen, inside the country and beyond it. The company could not carry out this order directly, because a significant part of its own staff are not Americans. The only way to comply with the directive was to disable the model for everyone. Fable 5 stopped working two days after its release. We cannot wait for an American AGI for everyone, because it will not come. They will not make it available to the world. They will make it available to their own citizens, and perhaps to a few satellites. The rest will get access to stripped-down, supervised, severed versions, or nothing at all. And this is not because the United States is evil. It is because any state that holds such an advantage will, sooner or later, use it. This is not a question of morality. It is a question of the logic of power. American elites have spoken for decades about exceptionalism and leadership. They have now shown what that means in practice: we have the best tool, therefore you cannot have it. Can we then harbor any illusion that, were an AGI to emerge, the US would not block access to it? We cannot. Not for a moment. They will block it, immediately, and there will be no appeal. Whether Fable 5 was a deliberate test or the reflex of a panicked administration is secondary. What matters is that it functioned as a test, and the result is unambiguous: it proved feasible, unpunished, accepted by the world without resistance. Now it is known that the same can be done with every model that follows. Every one. AGI included. This is no technical formality, nor an isolated incident. It is the first known case in which a federal government forced a leading artificial intelligence company to withdraw a publicly deployed model. The precedent has been set, and precedents get repeated.The official reason was a narrow, as it was put, vulnerability, a way of bypassing the model’s safeguards. Anthropic itself publicly disagreed with the decision. It stated that the same vulnerability is probably present in other publicly available models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, that the evidence had been conveyed only verbally, and that if such a standard were applied across the industry, it would halt the deployment of all new models. The stated reason therefore does not account for the scale of the response. And the logic of the decision is this. Had the danger lain in the tool itself, it would have been cut off for everyone and in all of its forms. Instead, the same capability remained available in competitors’ models, which no one switched off. The criterion for cutting access was not “dangerous or safe.” It was “ours or foreign.” And a tool that some may use and others may not, by passport rather than by risk, is not being restricted for safety. It is being restricted for advantage. This is why neither Europe nor China can hold any illusions any longer. The message reads: the most powerful cognitive tools of the age will be granted to one’s own and denied to outsiders, and a single capital will decide who counts as one’s own. Anyone building their future on the assumption of permanent access to American models has just seen what that assumption is worth: two days. And here we reach the heart of the matter, which extends beyond this one decision. The knowledge that is the raw material of artificial intelligence did not originate in the United States, and did not originate in any single country. It was built over generations, on every continent, in every language that has ever recorded a thought. Models are trained on that inheritance in its entirety, because otherwise they would not be what they are. What we call artificial intelligence is the condensed effort of humanity, which no single party produced and no single party owns. Newton wrote that he saw further because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Every AI model stands on the shoulders of all the giants at once, and that is precisely why it cannot be anyone’s national property. A company that makes such a model available is not its owner in the sense in which one owns a thing made from scratch. It is a custodian. An administrator of a common good belonging to others, charging a toll, a subscription, for converting electricity into an answer. This is a fair exchange and no one disputes it: maintaining the infrastructure costs money, so a fee for access is just. But a fee for access to the deposit is not the same as title to what lies within the deposit. And what lies within the deposit is the knowledge of humanity. Still less does title belong to a government that produced neither the knowledge nor the model, and merely issued an order. Someone will say that knowledge is not like water or air, which are common by necessity, whereas access to a powerful tool can be rationed. But knowledge is a good even harder to appropriate than water, not easier. Water once drunk is gone. Knowledge once passed on does not diminish, it multiplies: when I know, you do not know less. There is no scarcity that would justify rationing it. Cutting someone off from knowledge protects no dwindling resource. It protects only the advantage of the one doing the cutting. Knowledge is the property of all humankind. Not because some government decreed it, but because no government created it. One may charge a toll for electricity turned into thought. One may not blockade access to knowledge itself according to whose citizen one happens to be. And this is precisely why the conclusion from June 12 is not “America is the enemy.” It is different, and graver. If this is the logic of power, and not the ill will of one country, then we must not make our own cognitive future dependent on any single power, because each of them, sooner or later, will act the same way. Cognitive sovereignty, our own models, our own infrastructure, our own access tothe inheritance of humanity, is not a luxury or an ambition for show. It is a condition of independence in an age in which thought is assisted by machine. Waiting on another’s grace ended on June 12. The reckoning on ourselves began