In June 2026, a familiar instrument of U.S. economic statecraft crossed a line it had not crossed before. An export-control order no longer targeted only the chips, servers, or physical inputs that make advanced artificial intelligence possible. It targeted access to the model itself. Days after Anthropic released Fable 5 and Mythos 5, Washington instructed the company to suspend access by any foreign national, including foreign-national employees of Anthropic, after officials said they had become aware of a possible method for bypassing safeguards in Fable 5. Anthropic’s response was immediate and disruptive: it disabled both models for all customers in order to comply with the directive (Anthropic 2026; Time 2026; Al Jazeera 2026a). That sequence matters because it unsettles the ordinary political story told about export controls. The United States has long used export restrictions to shape access to strategic technologies. In artificial intelligence, those measures have focused mainly on advanced semiconductors, cloud compute, and the firms that supply them. What made the Anthropic episode different was the object of control. The machinery underneath artificial intelligence still mattered, but the order reached beyond the machinery. It turned the model, delivered through accounts, APIs, contracts, and workplace access, into the controlled item.

The order also sat awkwardly with the friend-enemy distinction that usually gives technology controls their public logic. Its sweep reached foreign nationals inside the United States, users abroad, firms in allied economies, and members of Anthropic’s own technical workforce. The government later eased the restriction in part, allowing Mythos 5 to be redeployed to a limited group of approved U.S. organizations, including their foreign-national employees. Yet the period of uncertainty was enough to make a broader point. This was not a narrowly calibrated denial of capability to a named adversary. It was a nationality-based restriction placed on a global cloud service, with consequences that spread across allies, domestic firms, employees, and customers (Reuters 2026a; Reuters 2026b).

This article treats the Anthropic episode less as a turning point than as a revealing stress test. It asks what happens when a chokepoint becomes so politically charged, and so technically hard to administer, that its use no longer separates adversaries from allies, foreign targets from domestic firms, or security risks from ordinary users. Weaponized interdependence has not lost its explanatory power. The case confirms its basic insight: control over a central node can become geopolitical leverage. What may be changing is the condition under which that leverage works. In the Anthropic case, the chokepoint effect appears to enter a more reflexive phase, where the act of denying access also damages the credibility, predictability, and domestic stability of the hub being defended.

Weaponized Interdependence, Revisited

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s theory of weaponized interdependence remains one of the clearest accounts of power in a networked world. Their central insight is direct. Global economic networks do not spread evenly. As firms, users, and institutions cluster around efficient systems, standards, and infrastructures, some nodes become far more important than others. States with jurisdiction over those nodes can convert market centrality into strategic leverage (Farrell and Newman 2019).

Farrell and Newman identify two main mechanisms. The first is the panopticon effect: the ability to gather strategically valuable information from flows that pass through a central node. The second is the chokepoint effect: the ability to deny others access to the network. In both cases, power does not require territorial occupation or direct command. It flows through ordinary dependence on infrastructures that often appear technical, private, and routine. A payment system, a data-routing architecture, a cloud provider, or a model-serving platform can look like commercial plumbing until a state uses its jurisdiction over that plumbing as leverage.

The theory was never only about the United States, but early examples made clear why Washington mattered so much. Dollar clearing, SWIFT, the internet backbone, and large American technology firms all gave the United States unusual reach over global flows. Farrell and Newman’s later book, Underground Empire, broadened the argument into a history of how America weaponized the world economy. Their claim is not that the United States designed every network........

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