On June 12, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent Anthropic a letter, and the company's two most capable models — Fable 5 and the restricted Mythos 5 — went dark for users worldwide. The order, reported to cite the Export Control Reform Act of 2018, barred any foreign national from accessing the models. Rather than try to verify the nationality of millions of users in real time, Anthropic pulled both offline and left its other models running.

Joel and Stephen, calling in from Sydney, trace how it happened: a launch on June 9, a CEO essay two days earlier asking Washington for the authority to block unsafe models, and a reported bypass found by an Amazon-linked partner that reached senior officials within days. From there they get into what it means to build a business on a model a government can switch off overnight, why Europe read the whole thing as an argument for its own sovereign AI, and whether Dario Amodei calling the directive a "misunderstanding" is a principled stand or the regulatory-capture critique his rivals keep making.

Also in this one: Sam Altman's bomb-shelter line, the case for proprietary models over frontier dependency, Anthropic's quiet IPO filing, and why both hosts think a government in "freak out mode" may have to walk this back. Recorded Tuesday, June 23 — with the directive still standing and G7 fallout still landing.