Claude's Fable5 model just got hit with a US government export ban blocking foreign users—even those physically in the US. The trigger? Too many Americans complained it's too expensive and literally asked China's DeepSeek to distill it and undercut pricing.

The enforcement is a technical nightmare. Claude has zero real-name verification, so they're stuck doing fuzzy heuristics across IP geolocation, phone numbers, payment methods, billing addresses, and device regions. None of this is precise. False positives are guaranteed, meaning actual US citizens will get blocked and need an appeal process.

This is basically "leadership says one thing, engineers break their backs trying to implement the impossible." The overhead of building and maintaining this geofencing + appeals system is going to be massive, all because the government took a meme-level complaint seriously.