By Shirin Ghaffary and Maggie Eastland
The US government removed foreign access restrictions on Anthropic PBC’s Fable 5 artificial intelligence model, clearing it for wider distribution after the startup resolved the Trump administration’s safety concerns.
The Commerce Department had imposed an export control rule via a private letter on June 12 requiring the company obtain US permission before allowing any foreign national, regardless of location, to access its powerful Mythos 5 AI model and Fable 5, a similar model intended for broader release. In response, the AI company disabled the models and has been in discussions with officials to satisfy their concerns.
Anthropic, in a post Tuesday on X, said it had received notice that Commerce was lifting the curbs on access to both models. Some of the restrictions on Mythos had been eased on June 26.
Anthropic said it would restore access to users beginning Wednesday.
“We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models,” the company said in its post.
In recent days, Anthropic’s executives including co-founder Tom Brown had been discussing the matter with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other officials to resolve the government’s immediate issues with its latest releases, Bloomberg previously reported.
The key to reversing the export controls was assuaging White House officials’ concerns about limiting the ability of bad actors to circumvent the models’ guardrails.
In a letter Tuesday to Anthropic viewed by Bloomberg, Lutnick said the company had pledged to “proactively deter and address security risks associated with the models.” The secretary said Anthropic had agreed to work with the government on “protocols and standards” for future models.
The maker of the Claude chatbot was valued at $965 billion after its latest funding round, making it one of the world’s most valuable private companies. Anthropic announced June 1 that it had filed confidentially for an initial public offering. The company is considering going to the public markets as soon as October, Bloomberg has reported.
Earlier this month, the company released Fable 5 as the first public-facing version of its Mythos-class model, but with guardrails aimed at containing the full range of its cyber capabilities. Fable 5 is prevented from responding to certain types of queries, including those related to cybersecurity and biology. In those cases, Anthropic has said its Claude chatbot will route responses through a different model, called Opus 4.8.
Though now reversed, the department’s export control directive marked the most significant intervention by the US government to date into an AI venture’s operations and sparked legal questions over whether export controls can be used to regulate AI model access. The decision to restrict the availability of Anthropic’s models also reverberated across the AI industry, particularly at rival startup OpenAI, which limited the release of a capable new AI model, GPT-5.6, under pressure from the Trump administration.
OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said Friday that at the request of the US government, the company would roll out its latest 5.6 Sol model in a preview version to select partners who were approved by the administration, before making it more available.
Tuesday’s decision to relax the restrictions on Anthropic’s Fable model also relieves tensions that were weighing on the startup’s already-tenuous relationship with the Trump administration. The company is suing the Pentagon after Secretary Pete Hegseth moved in March to designate it a supply-chain risk following a messy and unsuccessful contract renegotiation process.
The easing of the curbs on Fable 5 were reported earlier by Politico and Wired.
