On June 12, 2026, the US government forced a deployed, commercial, frontier AI model offline, Anthropic's three-day-old Claude Fable 5. As I write this on June 20, Fable is still unavailable, but the politics have swung hard toward de-escalation in the past week: the President now says Anthropic is no longer a national-security threat, and the two sides have started building a shared framework to grade jailbreak severity.
I wanted to forecast when Fable will return. (We at FutureSearch got a lot of evals and projects out of it, and it is really an amazing model.) But it all hinges on why it was pulled in the first place. Was it a sincere but mistaken panic over a capability that turns out to be ordinary? Is the model genuinely dangerous in a way the public record does not yet show? Is the real worry that an adversary got access? Or is it all politics?
My best guess is politics, and after the past week I hold that a little more firmly, but I'm still uncertain and put real probability weight on all four scenarios. So to forecast the outcome, I had to research all of them. Here is my view:
Update (June 20): Revised the expected US re-release from around July 12 to July 7, after President Trump's June 19 statement that Anthropic is no longer a national-security threat.
Even though "it's just politics" is my top hypothesis, now at even odds, I still give fully half the probability to the other three scenarios. The rest of the piece goes through these scenarios one by one. Then I produce my unconditional forecast of what will happen by summing up all the possibilities.
A companion piece, The Claude Fable ban barely changes Anthropic's IPO timing or valuation, works the financial impact. This one is about the dispute itself.
What happened
I'll describe what happened only briefly, with this summary timeline, as there are plenty of other sources on what happened when.
Anthropic launched a new top tier above Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. Mythos 5 is the most capable of the two and was kept tightly restricted: Anthropic's own red-team reporting describes a model that can autonomously find and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities across major operating systems and browsers (red.anthropic.com). Fable 5 is the guardrailed public version of that capability, with safety classifiers meant to block the high-risk cyber and bio territory.
On June 11, Amazon's Andy Jassy escalated a security finding to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Within roughly a day, the matter ran through an NSA review and the National Cyber Director, Sean Cairncross, and on June 12 at 5:21pm ET, Commerce, through a Bureau of Industry and Security "is-informed" letter under the Export Control Reform Act, ordered Anthropic to bar all foreign nationals from both models (Politico). The stated trigger was a "narrow, non-universal jailbreak," reportedly a prompt that asked the model to read a codebase and fix its flaws, which surfaced a handful of previously known minor vulnerabilities (Snyk). I am going to treat it as established, as most of the security community does, that this particular trigger is not a genuine novel vulnerability. It is ordinary dual-use behavior that peer models like GPT-5.5 also exhibit. (This doesn't mean the model isn't dangerous, though.)
Anthropic complied, called the action a misunderstanding, and went into daily negotiations. As of June 18 the public picture is a hard one. The White House is demanding two things before it will lift the order: a full accounting of the roughly fifty to a hundred and fifty entities that had been given Mythos access through Anthropic's "Project Glasswing" program, and guardrails that are close to "jailbreak-proof," a standard cybersecurity experts consider technically impossible (Wired). At the G7 summit on June 16 and 17 the administration refused allied carve-outs, calling them "completely illogical." Commerce has signaled that even the safer Fable's return is "contingent upon fully resolving the jailbreak concerns" (Wired). By the afternoon of June 18 the picture had softened. After talks collapsed the previous Friday, when Anthropic refused a demand to de-deploy Fable, a week of in-person meetings led the two sides, represented for Anthropic by policy head Sarah Heck and co-founder Tom Brown, to begin building a shared framework to grade the severity of jailbreaks and guide any government response, with the administration now conceding that no model can be made completely jailbreak-proof (Politico). The controls were not lifted, and a resolution was reported to be a ways off. Then, on June 19, the temperature dropped. In an interview taped after he met Amodei at the G7, President Trump said Anthropic was no longer a national-security threat, "not now, but a week ago, maybe," praised the company for "behaving very responsibly," and said he was not sure he still needed to act against it (Reuters). Bipartisan members of Congress had also just written to the administration demanding it justify the restrictions (Liccardo). The order still stands as I write on June 20, but the politics around it have clearly turned.
It's important to state that this did not come from nowhere. Anthropic had refused to let the Department of War use its models for some uses it would not name, and in February the administration designated the company a "supply chain risk." Anthropic sued, and a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction, calling the government's move "Orwellian" (Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War). The government appealed. The June order lands in the middle of that ongoing feud and just after Anthropic filed confidentially for a roughly $965B IPO. Second, the legal vehicle is novel and contested. Treating remote access to a hosted model as a "deemed export" of the model to foreign persons stretches export law in a way scholars call possibly illegal (Politico), but the same statute, ECRA, strips the standard route to challenge it in court.
Which of those four readings is correct shapes everything that follows. The four sections below take each scenario as true in turn and forecast every outcome inside it.
Scenario 1: A sincere mistake (20%)
In this world, the people who pulled the trigger believed in a real threat and were wrong. The "fix this code" demonstration genuinely alarmed non-technical officials in a fast, 24-to-72-hour cycle, and the alarm does not survive contact with the technical facts. The evidence that this is at least part of the story is strong. The process was a reactive scramble. The administration's demand that Anthropic make guardrails impossible to circumvent is something security experts uniformly call technically impossible, which reads more like naivety than calculation (Wired). Over a hundred cybersecurity researchers signed an open letter arguing the move misunderstands the technology and helps attackers more than it stops them (freefable.org), and Alex Stamos called the shutdown a death penalty for a speeding ticket.
What keeps this scenario from being the whole story, and caps it at 20%, is the selectivity. If the worry were a sincere but generic alarm about cyber-capable models, you would expect the government to be at least asking hard questions of GPT-5.5 and other peers with similar abilities. Instead it singled out the one company it was already fighting in court, the week after that company filed for a landmark IPO. A pure misunderstanding has trouble explaining why the sledgehammer fell on Anthropic specifically, even though Fable is the best ever released model.
If we are in this world, the path back is the friendliest of the four, because a good-faith actor adjusts when shown its premise was wrong. But "friendliest" is not "fast and clean". Even a government that realizes its technical premise was shaky cannot simply reverse a President-directed action without a face-saving exit. The administration has dug in publicly, refused allied carve-outs, and tied Fable's return to resolving jailbreak concerns it has already stated. So the natural shape of resolution here is not a clean climbdown. It is a package that lets both sides declare victory.
Concretely, conditional on Scenario 1, I forecast Fable back for US persons with a median around July 3, the fastest of any scenario, with a real chance of much sooner. The most likely mechanism is Anthropic's own KYC machinery, a privacy-policy change effective around July 8 that lets the company verify nationality and gate foreign nationals out, which is exactly the "recipient accounting" the government says it wants. On the question of how the dispute primarily resolves, even this friendly world lands on a negotiated compromise as modal at 45%, with a clean Anthropic-favorable fast restore now up to 36% after the President's de-escalation, an impasse into 2027 at 11%, and an outright Anthropic capitulation on its red lines at just 8%. The reason fast-restore is capped even here is the same face-saving logic: the moment Anthropic deploys a KYC gate, that gate is itself a concession, and what looked like a clean win reclassifies as a compromise.
The most useful thing about Scenario 1 is that if the premise was simply wrong, there is no reason to weaken Fable. I put the chance that Fable comes back materially capability-reduced, as opposed to returning essentially as launched with access gating, at only 14% in this world.
Scenario 2: The capability really is dangerous (8%)
This is the world where the government is substantively right, and right in the hardest way: the danger is intrinsic to the model. Mythos can autonomously find and exploit zero-days, Fable is a guardrailed wrapper over that same engine, and if the guardrails can be stripped, then the capability is loose regardless of who is nominally authorized to use it. In this world a vetted American with a jailbreak is as much a problem as a foreign adversary, and the only real remediation is to constrain what the model can do.
The case for this scenario is the genuine potency of the underlying capability, which is not in dispute. Anthropic's own materials describe Mythos finding serious vulnerabilities at scale, and the company itself had declined to make Mythos generally available, citing severe cyber risk. Reporting indicates an NSA review concluded the launch guardrails could be stripped. So the raw ingredients for a real, capability-level danger are present.
The case against, and the reason this is the lowest-weighted scenario at 14%, is the shape of the remedy. If the government believed the capability was dangerous in anyone's hands, barring foreign nationals while leaving Claude for Government and NSA access intact would be a strange cure. You do not solve a nationality-agnostic danger with a nationality filter. The order's structure, foreign-persons scope with domestic carve-outs preserved, points away from "the capability itself is the problem" and toward access. This is the single most important consistency check in the whole analysis, and it is why, when I split the broad "the security concern is real" case into its capability and access versions, the access version came out larger. After the President's June 19 reversal, that gap widened to 22% against 8%, because a genuinely intrinsic danger would not evaporate in a week just because the CEO had been cooperative. The remedy reveals the theory.
If we are nonetheless in the capability world, almost everything gets harder and slower, and this is the scenario that should worry a Fable user the most. Restoring access to US persons does not actually fix the stated problem, so the median US restoration slips to around September 18, with a fat tail into 2027, the slowest of the four. More strikingly, this is the scenario where the product comes back diminished. I put the chance that Fable returns materially weakened or re-guardrailed at 55% here, against 14 to 21% in every other world, because a genuine capability danger can only be met by actually reducing the capability, and the government's "jailbreak-proof" demand, impossible to satisfy perfectly, forces real degradation as the negotiated approximation. Mythos fares worst of all: in this world it most likely never returns to broad commercial use, ending up government-only or quietly superseded.
The endgame here is the one place the government has real leverage to win. Conditional on Scenario 2, compromise is now more clearly modal at 49%, but government-favorable capitulation stays elevated at 27%, by far its highest across the four worlds. If the danger is real and intrinsic, the government can legitimately demand heavy constraints, and Anthropic's commercial desperation, a flagship offline during an IPO run, gives it little room to refuse. Impasse into 2027 sits at 13%, and a clean fast restore is nearly off the table at 11%.
Scenario 3: The foreign-access worry is real (22%)
This is the most coherent of the "the government is right" stories, and at 23% it is the larger half of the substantive case. Here the concern who gets access. The model is acceptable in vetted American hands.
The evidence for this scenario is the order itself. It legally targets foreign nationals, full stop, and it preserves domestic government access. That is exactly the shape you would design if your worry were diversion rather than the capability. The factual seed is that Anthropic had expanded Mythos access through Project Glasswing to a list that included SK Telecom, and the White House's loss of trust reportedly centered on that expansion, with Commerce Secretary Lutnick citing the risk of the models being diverted to Chinese or Russian military intelligence (Reuters, Washington Post).
The evidence against a strong version is that the specific diversion worry is thin. I separately forecast the chance that a China-linked entity actually obtained meaningful Mythos access at only 21%. SK Telecom is a flagship Korean ally whose China ties are historical and minor, it denies improper access, and no public evidence shows real diversion. So Scenario 3 is most plausible as "a legitimate, precautionary access concern after a trust breakdown," and least plausible as "we caught an actual Chinese operation." A precautionary concern can be met with verification and accounting, which is tractable; a confirmed operation would harden into something closer to the capability world.
If we are in the access world, the path back is the most mechanically clean of any scenario, and it is the engine of my relatively optimistic US-restoration timing. Anthropic deploys its KYC verification, excludes foreign nationals, and the stated concern is addressed without touching Fable's capability. Conditional on Scenario 3, US restoration has a median around July 9, nearly as fast as the sincere-mistake world, and the product comes back essentially intact, with only a 21% chance of material capability reduction. The cost is borne entirely by the cohort the order actually targets: foreign-national access is the last and hardest thing to return.
The endgame is the friendliest-to-Anthropic of the substantive scenarios. I give compromise as most likely at 54%, a clean fast restore at 26%, and capitulation at just 8%, because a foreign-access problem is cleanly solvable by gating and does not require Anthropic to abandon its defense-use red lines.
Scenario 4: It is mostly politics (50%)
This is my single most likely scenario, and the past week pushed it from 43% to 50%. This scenario doesn't claim there is zero security content, but that this content is a pretext for leverage and retaliation in the broader fight between the Trump administration and Anthropic. What moved me most was the shape of the President's climbdown: on June 19 he said Anthropic was no longer a threat and praised it for "behaving very responsibly," which is the language of a leverage play that got what it wanted, not of a government that simply re-read the technical evidence.
The case rests on three things the other scenarios struggle to explain together. The first is selectivity. The disclosed trigger is ordinary dual-use behavior present in peer models, yet only Anthropic was hit. The second is the relationship. This is the same administration that, months earlier, designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk in a move a federal judge called "Orwellian" and likely retaliatory, after the company refused certain Department of War uses. The third is the instrument and the timing. The government reached for a novel, legally vulnerable "deemed export over SaaS" theory, against this one company, days after it filed for a roughly $965B IPO, when a model offline is maximally painful. Put those together and the most parsimonious account is leverage, not an emergent threat (Lawfare).
Why is my forecast for this scenario not higher? First, I think this order likely routed around the specific Pentagon faction, so it would require a larger anti-Anthropic coalation than the one revealed a few months ago. It's also not clear this is a good tactic from the White House. Do they want another legal fight, about taking an unprecedented action? The details here don't line up so cleanly with an escalation of the issue from a few months ago.
The implications of Scenario 4 are the most counterintuitive. If this is leverage, then the obvious "fast technical fix" does not actually unlock the door, because the door was never really about the technology. Holding the flagship offline is the leverage. That cuts both ways on timing. It argued, a week ago, for a slower and messier resolution than a sincere-but-fixable story would, because no amount of guardrail work satisfies a political bar. But leverage is also reversible overnight once Anthropic pays the price, and the price is political, not technical. That is roughly what just happened. The President's June 19 reversal reads like the goalpost sliding back once Anthropic had cooperated enough, which is why, in this scenario, the fast-restore odds jumped rather than the timing dragging out. Commerce had tied Fable's return to "fully resolving jailbreak concerns," which in a pretext world was always a movable goalpost, not a fixed bar.
This scenario's endgame shifted the most when the politics cooled. Compromise is still my top forecast at 46%, but the striking move is fast restore, which jumped to 33% from the 17% I had a week ago, because a leverage play ends the moment the leverage-holder decides it has won, and the President's praise for Anthropic's "responsible" compliance reads exactly that way. Government-favorable capitulation fell to 10%, since the administration now looks like it is declaring victory rather than squeezing for a deeper concession, and I put just 11% on impasse into 2027. Anthropic still almost certainly keeps its defense-use red lines, no autonomous weapons and no mass domestic surveillance, which it already won an injunction in the parallel fight to defend.
What holds in every scenario
As I wrote above, forecasting the outcomes is hard because the four scenarios disagree about a lot of basic facts about what is going on. The places they overlap are the conclusions I hold with the most confidence, because they do not require me to be right about the cause.
Four likely things in any scenario:
- A negotiated compromise, with Fable restored under expanded oversight while Anthropic keeps its red lines and Mythos and foreign access stay limited, is the single most likely resolution in every scenario, modal at 45% to 54% across the four.
- The cohorts come back US persons first, then Anthropic's own foreign-national employees, then a gated Mythos, and international customers last.
- Anthropic almost certainly keeps its defense-use red lines, and concedes expanded oversight instead, or some other concession
- Anthropic probably does not win this in court, and probably does not need to, about a 14% chance a court narrows the order by the end of 2026, because the likely path is a settlement anyway.
The first is the closest thing to a robust unconditional prediction in the piece. When I forecast the endgame conditional on each cause, the compromise-package archetype comes out modal in all four worlds: 45% under the sincere-mistake story, 49% under the capability story, 54% under the access story, and 46% under the political story. The reasons differ by world, a face-saving exit here, a legitimate safeguard there, a leverage settlement in the political case, but they converge on the same shape, because both sides have strong incentives to settle and a ready-made way to do it, namely Anthropic's KYC accounting plus the June 2 executive order's voluntary pre-deployment review.
The second follows from the legal structure of the order, which targets foreign-national access. Restoring Americans is then a matter of gating, while restoring foreigners requires the government to actually lift or license the restriction, a much higher bar; Anthropic's vetted employees sit in between, defensible as a narrow licensed carve-out but still, under the deemed-export theory, a controlled export. This ordering held in every scenario when I forecast the cohorts separately and blind to each other, which is a useful internal consistency check. A US user and an international user are not waiting on the same clock, and the gap between them is months, not days.
The third rests on the export fight being substantially decoupled from the older Department of War feud. Anthropic already does extensive national-security work and holds a $200M Department of Defense agreement, so its real red lines, no fully autonomous weapons and no mass domestic surveillance, are narrow and identity-defining, and it has a live court win backing its right to draw them. The concession the headlines reach for, a reversal of those red lines, is the one I think least likely. What Anthropic gives up to end this is far more likely to be oversight and recipient accounting than its founding principles.
The fourth turns on ECRA. The deemed-export-over-SaaS theory is novel and, several scholars argue, possibly unlawful, but ECRA strips the standard Administrative Procedure Act route to challenge an export control, leaving only a narrow and deferential ultra vires path that courts rarely grant against a national-security action. I put the chance a court blocks, narrows, or vacates the order at about 14% by the end of 2026 and 22% by mid-2027, with a large mass on never, because the modal path is a negotiated settlement that moots any lawsuit. The likely legal event is not a dramatic injunction but a quiet protective administrative appeal, which Anthropic's counsel has reason to file by the EAR Part 756 deadline around July 27 to preserve its rights while the talks continue; when I forecast that Anthropic files a formal legal or administrative challenge, the roughly 42% by year-end is mostly that protective filing.
When Fable comes back, and why I am under the market
Here is the headline number, the one most people actually want, and the one where I disagree most with the crowd.
I forecast Fable 5 back for US persons with a median around July 7, roughly 34% by July 1, with a right tail that is now much shorter than it was a week ago. The de-escalation has largely closed off the worlds where the standoff hardened into the fall. This is shown in the graph below, compared to where prediction markets are as of June 20.
I built it two independent ways, as before, but this time they no longer agree as tightly. The first way is bottom-up: forecast US restoration separately inside each of the four scenarios, then weight by the scenario probabilities. That gives a median around July 9, anchored on the verification mechanism Anthropic can switch on around July 8. The second way is top-down: forecast the same question directly, in one shot, without the scenario scaffolding. That one moved faster on the President's reversal, to a median of July 2. The split itself is informative: the direct forecast is pricing a handshake that lands before the technical gate is even live, while the scenario build waits for the gate. I sit between them, at around July 7.
Prediction markets, as of mid-June, had restoration to US customers near 57% by July 1, around 67% by July 10, and 75% by July 17 (CNBC on Kalshi). I am still about 23 points below them at July 1 (34% against 57%), but the gap nearly closes after that: I am at roughly 58% by July 10 against their 67%, and 69% by July 17 against their 75%. So I no longer think they are badly wrong about mid-July, I just doubt the very fast, by-July-1 restore as much as they price it. The disagreement still comes down to one question, which I forecast on its own: can Anthropic re-enable US access unilaterally, just by gating foreigners out?
I now put the "fast, unilateral, decoupled" path at 48%, up from 40% a week ago. The reason it was low is that Commerce had coupled even Fable's return to "fully resolving the jailbreak concerns," a guardrail standard experts call impossible, on top of a President-directed action Anthropic was loath to defy in the middle of an IPO and a legal recourse ECRA has mostly closed. Two things since then loosened that coupling: the administration conceded that no model can be made fully jailbreak-proof and moved toward a workable severity framework, and the President himself signaled he no longer needs to act. Both make a decoupled, US-only restore easier to imagine. I did not move all the way to the market, because the order still has not actually been lifted, the foreign-access and Mythos questions are untouched by a "they behaved responsibly" remark, and the President's positions can move back as fast as they moved here.
The other cohorts trail, and by a lot. Restoring Fable to foreign-national and international customers is the hardest tier, because lifting that restriction is the actual concession, not a side effect. I put it at roughly 6% by July 1, with a significant chance that international access does not come back in 2026 at all. Anthropic's own foreign-national employees land in between. Here this is in a graphic:
Looking at this again, my analysis is less pessimistic than it was a week ago, which feels closer to right. The past week reshaped it: the administration eased off the strict "jailbreak-proof" demand toward a workable severity framework, and then the President de-escalated outright, so my whole distribution pulled earlier and the long tail shrank. The near-term median still waits on the verification mechanism, live around July 8, and on an order that has not formally been lifted, which is why I did not move all the way to the market.
For what this timing does to Anthropic's IPO and valuation, which is a separate question with its own tail risks, see the companion financial forecast. The quick answer is that I think this actually doesn't effect the IPO much, other than making the worst-case outcomes more likely for Anthropic.
What about Mythos?
Most of the public attention is on Fable, because it is the consumer-facing model. Mythos matters too, for cybersecurity reasons, and maybe some recursive-self-improvement reasons inside Anthropic.
Before the order Mythos was available only to a vetted set of roughly fifty to a hundred and fifty critical-infrastructure organizations through Project Glasswing, and Anthropic itself said it would not make the model generally available, citing severe cyber risk (Anthropic).
My modal outcome, at 49%, is that Mythos returns to roughly the restricted footprint it had, vetted and gated, and goes no further. Adding the broad and gated cases, there is about a 67% chance of some commercial availability, and about a 33% chance that Mythos never returns to any non-government commercial use, either locked into a federal enclave or quietly aged out during a long standoff. The White House reportedly opposes expanding Mythos commercial access on its own merits, independent of the current fight.
So here is my overall assessment of what will happen to Mythos:
Mythos most likely returns to gated, vetted access. Whether it returns commercially at all depends on the cause.
How it all ends
Pulling the threads together, I forecast how the dispute primarily resolves across four endgame scenarios:
The single most likely way this ends is a compromise package: Fable returns for US persons under a verification and oversight regime, Anthropic grants the recipient accounting the government wants and accepts some pre-deployment review, but keeps its defense-use red lines, while Mythos and foreign access stay gated or phased. That outcome is modal no matter which scenario is true, which is why I lead with it as the base case despite all the uncertainty about which root scenario we're even in.
The next most likely, at 30%, is an Anthropic-favorable fast restore, where the government effectively backs off and the models return quickly with little substantive concession. This is where the past week moved the most: a clean fast restore used to sit at 21%, but the President's de-escalation made it much more plausible, especially inside the political scenario, where the leverage can simply be released. It is still nearly absent from the capability world, where a real danger cannot be waved off.
At 11% is a government-favorable resolution, where Anthropic concedes more than it wants to in order to get its flagship back. This fell from 18% as the politics cooled: with the President praising Anthropic rather than squeezing it, the world where the government extracts a heavy win looks less likely. What is left of this tail is concentrated in the capability world, where the government would have a legitimate basis to demand real constraints. Note that "government-favorable" does not have to mean Anthropic drops its red lines; more often it means accepting capability limits or a permanent Mythos restriction.
At 11% is an impasse into 2027, a prolonged stalemate or grinding litigation with the models absent, intermittent, or US-only well past year-end. I had this at 15% a week ago; the de-escalation trimmed it, since the worlds where this hardens into a year-long standoff are exactly the ones the President's reversal made less likely. It is still a real tail, because some version of it is possible in all four scenarios.
Finally, I took a look at the implications beyond just Anthropic and its models.
Will this spread to other AI labs?
A reasonable fear, after the first time a government switches off a frontier model, is that it becomes routine. I think that fear is mostly misplaced on a one-year horizon.
I give an 11% chance that another frontier lab (OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, Mistral) gets a comparable order restricting one of its deployed models by the end of 2026, 20% by mid-2027, and 30% by the end of 2027. The action really looks idiosyncratic to Anthropic to me. The administration is reportedly unlikely to extend similar controls to peers, and those peers are cooperative in a way Anthropic is not: they have signed voluntary pre-deployment evaluation agreements with the government's testing body, and OpenAI maintains explicit defense partnerships. For another lab to get this treatment you would need both a severe capability discovery and a breakdown in that cooperative posture.
A standardized regime is a closer call, and the Anthropic fight may be its seed. As of June 18, the White House and Anthropic were reported to be jointly building a framework to grade the severity of AI security flaws and guide government intervention, an approach other labs and G7 leaders endorsed (Politico). That is the embryo of exactly such a regime, and the Lutnick letter already asserts that foreign access requires a Commerce license, so I put around a 23% chance the government stands up a formal, binding frontier-model licensing or pre-deployment regime by the end of 2026, higher than the low odds I would have given two weeks ago. It stays a minority outcome: the June 2 executive order explicitly disclaimed mandatory licensing, the administration recently cancelled a planned FDA-style vetting process over competitiveness concerns, and a severity-grading benchmark is not yet binding licensing. But the near-term default is no longer pure status quo.
June 12 did set a precedent that can be used again, but the conditions that produced it, a uniquely adversarial relationship, a specific trust breakdown, and a legally aggressive instrument, do not obviously generalize. I do wonder if such a "kill switch" is a good thing for the US government to have, but sticking with forecasts, not my own suggestions, I don't think we'll see more of this.
What would change my mind
I would not be surprised to find out tomorrow we're in one of my less likely scenarios, e.g. it wasn't primarily politics. That would invalidate most of this research, and I could spend more time thinking about the scenario we're actually in. But what if we don't find out? Shifting probability around these 4 scenarios might be the best we can do for some weeks.
A few specific signals would move me to shift things around, and one of them already arrived. The President's June 19 reversal is exactly the kind of statement I said would matter, and it moved me toward politics and toward a faster, cleaner resolution. The next ones to watch: if litigation discovery or investigative reporting surfaces direct coordination between the order and the Department of War faction, the political weight should rise further. If credible evidence emerges of actual hostile-foreign action, that would move toward the substantive scenarios. And the order actually being lifted, rather than talked about, is the signal that would finally settle the timing.
Notes on methods
There is a vast amount of research to consider, and dozens of forecasting questions when looking at all 4 scenarios. I couldn't keep it all in my head, so I did this by guiding the best FutureSearch forecaster through a scenario modeling exercise.
The shape of the model: one event, four hidden interpretations, the moves each side can make, and the outcomes. Every outcome is forecast under each interpretation, then weighted by how likely the interpretation is.
First of course was figuring out what the scenarios were, and shaping them to cover the outcomes and be mutually exclusive. I initially had 3 but decided I needed 4. Then I could choose the forecasting questions that mattered the most to outcomes. Then I could run each forecast (every downstream outcome, restoration timing for each cohort, the terms of return, Mythos's fate, Anthropic's concessions, the endgame) conditional on each scenario. I did some iteration to align the outcomes with my views.
Then I had to do a lot of consistency fixes, since this many independent forecasts led to inconsistent world states. In some case I tweaked forecasts directly, other times I simply passed in more research and re-ran them. Also, the research in the forecasts uncovered new questions I wanted answered, which I then added in.
One nice thing about this is that I have all these forecasts available. So if something changes, I can re-run every forecast in the entire scenario and update views much faster than I could if I did all this forecasting as a human, or with a team of humans. That is exactly what this update is: when the President reversed course on June 19, I re-ran the whole model in an afternoon, re-weighted the scenarios, and pulled the new numbers through every chart.
Run this forecast yourself by
connecting FutureSearch to Claude
then ask it to forecast any set of these scenarios or questions.
See also: The Claude Fable ban barely changes Anthropic's IPO timing or valuation and the full Anthropic financial forecast.