US lifts export controls on Anthropic's advanced AI models
Article excerpt
Less than three weeks after ordering Anthropic to suspend access to its Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models over national security concerns, the US Commerce Department has lifted the export restrictions entirely. The reversal is striking: Washington had invoked fears that advanced AI could be weaponized by military or intelligence services in China, Russia, and other adversarial nations, tightening oversight of new model releases to screen for potential threats. Now Anthropic can restore full customer access. The decision signals a recalibration of how aggressively the US is willing to police AI exports, even as it continues to wrestle with whether cutting-edge models pose genuine security risks or whether heavy-handed controls simply cede competitive advantage to foreign rivals. OpenAI faced similar restrictions on its GPT-5.6 model, though it was asked to limit rollout to vetted partners rather than suspend entirely. The pace of the reversal raises questions about what changed in those three weeks, and whether the initial restrictions were precautionary theater or substantive assessment.
Fable and Mythos are back, baby.
Anthropic has announced it will restore access to its most powerful models, Claude Fable 5, and Claude Mythos 5, to users worldwide on Wednesday July 1.
The decision comes after the U.S. government lifted the worldwide export ban on the models, as it deemed them too powerful to be used by foreign nationals.
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"We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. We'll begin restoring access tomorrow (...) We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models," the company said in a tweet.
In a blog post published late on Tuesday, the company said Fable 5 will be available for users globally on the Claude Platform, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. For Pro, Max, Team, and select Enterprise team, Fable 5 will be included for up to 50 percent of weekly usage limits through July 7; after that, it will be available via usage credits. Fable 5 will not be immediately available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry, but Anthropic says that's coming "as quickly as possible."
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Mythos 5, which is exceptionally good at finding security vulnerabilities, was never widely available, with Anthropic giving access only to select companies and organizations. Those, too, were cut off after Trump's administration intervened. Anthropic restored access to Mythos 5 following the government's approval on June 26. The company says it's coordinating with the government to expand access to more partners, both domestic and international, through its Glasswing program.
In its post, Anthropic once again provided a timeline of events which led to the government ban. It all started with a vulnerability, found by Amazon researchers, which enabled users to bypass Fable 5 safeguards, prompting the U.S. government to ban the models altogether. Anthropic says this vulnerability could not have been used to provide Mythos-level hacking techniques, but it's now fixed with a new safeguard that blocks any dangerous requests.
"The new classifier also comes at the cost of flagging benign requests more often during routine coding and debugging tasks. As with all our safeguards, we’ll continue to refine this to better distinguish genuine misuse from legitimate requests and reduce false positives," said the blog post.