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Anthropic opens Seoul office on day 7 of Fable 5 ban as executive pledges models will return soon

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

Anthropic held a Seoul press conference on June 18 to launch its South Korea office and sign a government MOU, while International Managing Director Chris Ciauri said Fable 5 and Mythos 5 would be re-enabled in the coming days.

Anthropic opens Seoul office on day 7 of Fable 5 ban as executive pledges models will return soon

Anthropic opened its Seoul office on June 18, 2026, seven days into a U.S. government-ordered suspension of Fable 5 and Mythos 5. At a press conference held the same day at the Conrad Seoul, International Managing Director Chris Ciauri publicly committed that the blocked models would return.

What happened

The Trump administration issued an export control directive on June 12, ordering Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals, inside and outside the United States. Anthropic complied that day, cutting off both models for its entire global customer base to ensure compliance, per its own statement. The company said it received the directive at 5:21 p.m. ET on June 12. The government cited national security concerns but provided no specific technical detail in the letter.

Six days later, Anthropic held a previously-scheduled Seoul launch event that had been arranged to mark the office opening. The timing placed executives on stage in a market at the center of the controversy. A Washington Post report had identified a South Korean telecommunications company, later named by WIRED as SK Telecom, as the trigger for Washington's concern: U.S. officials reportedly became alarmed after learning that a Korean carrier they suspected of having ties to China had received access to Mythos through Anthropic's Project Glasswing cybersecurity program. SK Telecom denied any ties to China.

At the Conrad Seoul press conference, Ciauri said: "We are very confident that in the coming days, the models will become available again," per Korea JoongAng Daily. It is the most specific on-record pledge from an Anthropic executive since the ban began. Ciauri declined to comment on Project Glasswing directly at the event.

Alongside the Seoul launch, Anthropic signed a Memorandum of Understanding with South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT to support AI safety across the public sector, per its announcement page. Partnerships were announced with SK Telecom, LG CNS, Naver Cloud, Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and a research consortium that includes KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei University, and POSTECH. The company also said NAVER had deployed Claude Code across its entire engineering organization.

Background on the ban

Anthropic's June 12 statement pushed back on the government's reasoning. The company reviewed a demonstration of the jailbreak technique cited by officials and described the vulnerabilities as narrow and non-universal, meaning the bypass unlocks only limited behavior rather than broadly disabling safety guardrails. Anthropic said it found comparable capabilities in other publicly available models, including GPT-5.5. The company stated that it had received only verbal evidence of a narrow jailbreak and disagreed that such a finding warranted pulling a commercial model from hundreds of millions of users.

The directive covered Fable 5 and Mythos 5 only. Anthropic's other models, including Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku, remained available throughout.

The Korea JoongAng Daily report noted that Tom Brown, one of Anthropic's co-founders, had been scheduled to appear at the Seoul press conference but was replaced at the last minute by Ciauri.

Project Glasswing, the cybersecurity initiative through which select organizations received Mythos access, has approximately 150 partners per Anthropic, including Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and SK Telecom. SK Telecom invested $100 million in Anthropic in 2023. South Korea ranked 12th among 116 countries in per-capita Claude usage in a March 2026 Anthropic economic report, per UPI.

Why it matters

The Seoul event put Anthropic in an awkward position: celebrating a market expansion in the country whose carrier reportedly precipitated the shutdown. Ciauri's restoration pledge is the clearest signal yet that Anthropic expects a resolution before the situation calcifies into a longer regulatory standoff, but the company offered no mechanism or timeline beyond "coming days."

For Claude users globally, the ban is now in its seventh day with no Commerce Department confirmation of a path forward. Anthropic's own statement said the government's action did not adhere to the principles of transparency, technical grounding, and statutory process the company believes should govern such directives. The company said it was complying with the order while disagreeing with it.

The episode is a test of how the U.S. export control framework applies to commercial AI models. If a narrow, non-universal jailbreak is sufficient grounds to pull a model already deployed to hundreds of millions of people, that standard would affect every frontier AI provider. Anthropic said as much explicitly in its June 12 statement.

South Korea's response has been to deepen its institutional relationship with Anthropic rather than pull back. The MOU with the Ministry of Science and ICT covers AI safety evaluation in the Korean language, cybersecurity threat exchange, and coordination with the Korea AI Safety Institute, according to the Anthropic announcement.

What to watch next

The next concrete milestone is June 20. That date marks the refund window deadline for subscribers who joined or upgraded during the period June 9 to June 14, according to the brief. If Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are not restored by then, Anthropic will be managing a subscriber refund process alongside an unresolved regulatory dispute.

Beyond the deadline, a named-source confirmation from the Commerce Department or the White House confirming that the export control directive has been lifted or modified would be the first hard indicator that Ciauri's "coming days" pledge is on track. Any official statement from the Bureau of Industry and Security would carry the most weight.

Sources