Anthropic on Tuesday moved Claude Fable 5 out of its Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise subscription plans and onto a usage-credit system, ending a two-week window in which the consumer-facing Mythos-class model was bundled at no extra cost. The company frames the shift as demand management, not a paywall, and says it’ll restore standard inclusion “as quickly as we can.”

The two weeks weren’t quiet. Fable 5 launched on June 9. On June 12, at 5:21 p.m. Eastern, Anthropic received a U.S. export-control directive, reported by Fortune to have come from the Commerce Department, that forced the company to disable both Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every user, including its own non-citizen employees. Other Claude models, Opus 4.8 among them, kept running.

The government’s stated basis was a method for bypassing Fable 5’s safeguards. Anthropic’s internal review concluded the technique was a narrow jailbreak that other publicly available models could reproduce, and the company disputed the directive’s rationale. “This action does not adhere to those principles,” Anthropic wrote, referring to its view that government blocks should travel through a transparent statutory process.

The commercial mechanics now look different against that backdrop. A two-week giveaway interrupted by an export halt leaves Anthropic absorbing demand it can’t fully predict, on a flagship product it can’t fully guarantee. Fortune separately reported that Anthropic confidentially filed for a public listing earlier in June.

The metered tier arrives in the gap between those facts.

Sources