The Off Switch You Don’t Control

In June, the U.S. government switched off two of the most capable AI models on the market. Most companies cannot even tell you which models they would lose if it happened to them.

On June 13, the U.S. Commerce Department invoked national-security export controls to bar two frontier models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, from any foreign national, including the vendor’s own non-citizen employees. Because the company could not separate users cleanly in real time, the practical effect was a global shutoff. Businesses that had built real work…