They banned Claude Fable 5 in a weekend — and proved the whole point of Hearth
Last Friday, a letter from the U.S. government landed on Anthropic's desk, and Claude Fable 5 — their most capable model, three days old — was gone. Not deprecated. Not rate-limited. Switched off, worldwide, for everyone, mid-project. An export-control directive cited national security, and overnight the smartest tool a lot of people had ever used simply stopped answering.
Greg Isenberg put out a sharp little video about it — “Claude Fable 5 is BANNED. What to do?” — and his answer is the right one: stop renting all of your intelligence from someone else's data center. Run a model on your own machine. It's private, it costs nothing after the hardware, and no letter, no outage, no price hike, and no ban can reach into your laptop and turn it off.
I agree with every word. I agree so much that I spent the last week shipping exactly this.
So here's my one note on his video, said with respect: his “what to do” is a homework assignment.
A great reading list — for engineers
Watch the steps he lays out. Install a runtime — LM Studio or Ollama. Match the model to your machine: 4 billion parameters here, 12 billion there, 16 gigs of RAM is the sweet spot. Choose between Qwen, DeepSeek, Gemma, and Llama. Learn quantization. Wire up an agent loop. Master model routing. It's a great list — it's the list I'd hand a developer who wants to go deep.
But my mom is never going to learn quantization. Neither is your accountant, your pastor, or the small-business owner who just wants to ask a private question without it becoming someone's training data. The people who most need an AI that can't be switched off are exactly the people who will never open a terminal.
The version with no homework
So I built the other one. It's called Hearth, and it turns that entire five-step checklist into a single click.
You open a link. A model downloads into your browser the way a movie buffers before a flight — once — and then it runs on your own computer. No install. No account. No API key. No model names, no parameter counts, no quantization menu. Just Fast, Smart, and Genius, in plain English, because I already made every one of those technical decisions for you.
And then the part that lands every time: turn your wifi off. It keeps working. The conversation never left your machine to begin with.
The video described my product
Here's the part I want to underline. Near the end, Greg lists five startup ideas for this new era — and two of them are privacy-first tools where your data never leaves, and a resilience layer for when the cloud gets pulled out from under you. That's not a forecast. That's a description of the thing I already shipped. Hearth is those two ideas, built for a person instead of an enterprise.
And I'll be honest about the trade
Because Hearth is honest about everything: a small model running in your browser is not Fable 5, and I will never pretend it is. The frontier cloud models are smarter, and for huge, sprawling jobs you'll still want them. But the daily eighty percent — drafting the email, untangling the document, thinking out loud, asking the thing you'd never type into a company's server — that work doesn't need a supercomputer. It needs to be private, and it needs to still be there on a Friday night when somebody, somewhere, decides it shouldn't be.
The cloud is a rental. Last week a lot of people found out the landlord can change the locks.
Hearth is the one you own. It's free, the full source is public, and it was built by a person — not a data center. Come try it — wifi optional — and tell me what you think. It goes straight to me.