June 18, 2026

The White House export control dispute with Anthropic remained unresolved by June 18, 2026. On June 12, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick issued a directive ordering Anthropic to immediately suspend all access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States. Unable to screen users by nationality at scale, Anthropic disabled both models globally, taking its two most capable AI systems offline for all users worldwide.

The action followed a briefing to senior administration officials by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who described how Amazon researchers had used a sequence of prompts to elicit restricted cybersecurity information from Mythos 5. White House AI adviser David Sacks later said Anthropic had declined to patch the vulnerability before the government acted. Anthropic disputed that characterization, arguing the jailbreak was narrow in scope and that comparable techniques could extract similar capabilities from competing models not subject to the same restrictions.

Senior Anthropic technical staff traveled to Washington over the weekend of June 14-15 to negotiate with Commerce Department officials, and the company submitted a formal proposal to Secretary Lutnick. Talks were still ongoing as of June 18, with no resolution announced and both models remaining offline. The Predict Six community gave only 44 percent odds of a resolution before Thursday, correctly anticipating the stalemate.

Phil Mickelson did not disclose the specific reason for his absence from competitive golf ahead of or during the 2026 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills. Mickelson had stepped away from the LIV Golf Tour in February 2026 after citing an undisclosed family health matter, and he subsequently missed the Masters in April and the PGA Championship in May. His attorneys issued a statement in June that read: "Phil continues to attend to a family health matter and is uncertain when he will be able to return to professional golf," but offered no additional details.

Mickelson was not eligible for the U.S. Open field: the five-year exemption he earned as the 2021 champion had expired, and the USGA chose not to extend a special invitation. His absence became one of the central storylines of the major, with his former caddie and golf media figures publicly speculating about his condition.

A separate story emerged in mid-June when Golf Digest reported that Mickelson had been removed from membership at The Farms Golf Club outside San Diego following allegations of non-consensual, inappropriate contact with a female employee earlier in the spring. His representatives described that matter as distinct from the health situation. No specific health disclosure was made before the U.S. Open concluded. The Predict Six community predicted a disclosure at 55 percent, but none materialized.