US lifts export controls on Anthropic AI models

The U.S. government has lifted export controls on Anthropic’s most advanced artificial intelligence models, clearing the company to begin restoring access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after a weekslong dispute with the Trump administration.

Anthropic said late Tuesday that the Commerce Department had notified the company it had removed the restrictions. The San Francisco-based AI firm said it would begin restoring access Wednesday.

“We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models,” Anthropic said in a statement posted on X.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said his department had coordinated with Anthropic on the review. “Over the past two weeks, we have worked closely with Anthropic to analyze and approve Fable 5 to ensure alignment across the US Government and strengthen America’s leadership in AI,” Lutnick wrote on X.

The move reverses restrictions imposed last month after the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to block foreign nationals, including some of the company’s own employees, from accessing the models. Anthropic said at the time that the breadth of the order effectively required it to disable the systems.

The two models run on Anthropic’s Claude platform, a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Fable 5 was released to the public earlier this month with safeguards the company said were designed to reduce the risk of misuse for cyberattacks or other harmful activity. Mythos 5, described as a version with fewer guardrails, was initially set to be made available to a select group of major companies for testing purposes, CBS News reported.

The BBC reported that Fable 5 is a consumer model capable of deep reasoning and performing complex tasks independently, while Mythos 5 is designed for businesses and cybersecurity experts and is said to be able to identify vulnerabilities in computer code and exploit them.

Anthropic abruptly suspended access to the models in June after U.S. authorities raised national security concerns. The company said the government’s concerns appeared to center on a possible “jailbreak,” a technique used to bypass an AI system’s safety guardrails.

“Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5,” Anthropic said at the time, according to the BBC.

The company disputed the need for a recall. “[We] disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people,” Anthropic said, according to CBS News. “If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”

On Friday, Anthropic said it had received approval to provide the models to U.S. organizations that “operate and defend critical infrastructure” and was working with the government to restore broader public access. CNBC and The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Commerce Department had begun allowing certain companies and government entities to use Mythos 5 again, CBS News reported.

The dispute unfolded as the Trump administration weighs the risks of powerful AI models against concerns about slowing U.S. industry leadership. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a voluntary 30-day review process for the most advanced private AI models in cooperation with the federal government. Trump had delayed signing the order, telling reporters he did not want to “get in the way” of U.S. AI leadership or risk giving China an edge, CBS News reported.

Shortly before Anthropic announced the restrictions had been lifted, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles thanked companies that had cooperated with the executive order, including on “advanced model access and guardrail testing and security.”