The Commerce Department's order to block foreign access to Anthropic's top models sent decentralized AI tokens surging and gave Chinese AI labs a gift-wrapped opening.
The US Commerce Department told Anthropic on June 12 to cut off foreign nationals from its most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns. Anthropic’s response was to shut down both models for everyone, domestic users included, rather than attempt to build selective access controls on the fly.
Fable 5 had been live for exactly three days. Anthropic launched it on June 9 as its first “Mythos-class” model, a designation the company uses for its most capable systems. Three days later, Commerce Department officials determined that the model’s capabilities posed cybersecurity risks, particularly around potential “jailbreak” methods that could allow adversaries to extract dangerous information.
Rather than engineer a geofencing solution under pressure, Anthropic pulled the plug entirely. By that evening, neither Fable 5 nor Mythos 5 was accessible to any user, anywhere.
Chinese AI developers did not waste time. In the wake of Anthropic’s shutdown, labs released new models including GLM-5.2 and K2.7-Code, positioning them as freely available alternatives for the global developer community that just lost access to one of the world’s most capable AI systems.
The crypto market’s reaction was swift and directional. Venice’s VVV token surged approximately 14% to $16.37, with trading volume jumping nearly 200%. Morpheus’s MOR token climbed about 21% to $2.28 within the same window.
Both projects position themselves as decentralized, censorship-resistant AI platforms. The founders of Venice and Morpheus were quick to frame Anthropic’s shutdown as a validation of their thesis, arguing that if centralized AI providers can be forced to cut off users overnight based on government directives, then developers and businesses need alternatives that don’t have a single point of regulatory failure.
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