Hi there,
On Tuesday it was the most capable AI model on the planet. By Friday it was gone.
Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 on the 9th. Three days later the US government ordered it switched off, and it disappeared for everyone, everywhere, overnight.
If your business was leaning on it, that wasn’t a tooling problem. It was a foundations problem. The real question is whether you’d have seen it coming.
This week in AI
Here’s what happened, because it matters well beyond the headlines. Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 on 9 June as its most capable model yet, built for long and complex work, live across the main platforms from day one. On 12 June the US government issued an export-control order over a national security concern, a reported way of getting around the model’s safeguards. The order was aimed at foreign nationals, but Anthropic couldn’t separate them from everyone else in real time, so it switched the model off worldwide. Refunds are going out to people who had paid for access.
Everything else kept running. Opus, Sonnet, Haiku, the everyday Claude most people actually use, all untouched and online. It was the brand new top-end model that vanished.
And it wasn’t only the government. Two days earlier Microsoft had already dropped Fable from its internal tooling because the data terms didn’t fit. One model, two completely different outside forces, same week, gone.
We’re staying out of the row about who was right. The useful part is underneath it.
The practical bit
Solid ground, or someone else’s?
You can’t control whether a tool gets pulled. You can control how much of your business is standing on it.
The businesses that shrugged last Friday had Fable as a part they could swap. The ones that sweated had built it into the walls. Same event, very different week.
Solid foundations, when you use AI, means owning the things that don’t disappear when a model does.
- Your process. Written down, so it survives a change of tool. The steps are yours, whatever runs them.
- Your context and data. The stuff that makes any model useful should be yours, kept somewhere you control, not locked inside one product.
- Your people’s skill. Knowing how to brief AI well carries across whatever you use. The tool is rented. The skill is owned.
- Your guardrails. Simple rules for what’s allowed, so swapping one tool for another doesn’t mean starting from scratch.
A five-minute test. If your main AI tool went dark tomorrow morning, what would stop working? If the honest answer is “a lot”, that’s worth fixing before someone else decides the timing for you.
Free resources
Claude: A Beginner’s Guide
The cheapest foundation to start on is the one that travels furthest: knowing how to use the tools well. This free guide takes you from a standing start to getting real work out of Claude. And the habit it teaches, briefing the tool properly instead of treating it like a search box, holds up whatever model you end up on.
New here? You’ll set up a free community login on the way in.
What’s on
The sessions below ran in June 2026. For what is coming up, see upcoming events.
Just over three weeks to go. Two sessions, same venue. Come for the morning, the afternoon or both.
Build Along with AI
9 July 2026 · White City, London · 11:00 to 13:00
A working session, not a talk. You leave with the start of your own AI strategy and a one-page policy you’ve written yourself. The foundation, in other words.
Free virtual waitlist
The AI Foundry Live
9 July 2026 · White City, London · 13:30 to 16:30
Our quarterly free live event. Two short talks from guest speakers, then time to compare notes with other UK business owners over an afternoon coffee.
Speaking this time: Mahdi Shariff, founder of Humble AI, and Hannah Morris of Let’s Trailblaze.
Free, uncapped
If this week made the case for building on your own foundations, the morning is where you start.
The ground moved for everyone. It only mattered for some.
You can’t predict which tool gets pulled, or when. You can make sure your business isn’t standing on any single one of them. The firms that barely noticed Friday weren’t lucky. They had understood their dependencies before anything tested them.
Next week, the parts of your AI setup worth owning outright, and the parts you should be happy to rent.
Hit reply and tell me what would stop working if your main AI tool went dark tomorrow. I read every reply.
Know someone who’s built their business on one tool? Forward this on.
Understand first. Then act.
Richard