The US government has lifted the ban on Anthropic‘s most advanced AI model, Claude Mythos 5, permitting the company to grant access to more than 100 US organisations, including large corporations and government agencies.
In a letter obtained by WIRED, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Anthropic’s cofounder Tom Brown that the firm could share the model with trusted partners because he had “determined that appropriate safeguards are in place.” Semafor first reported the existence of the correspondence.
“Anthropic has worked with the U.S. government to address risks associated with the Covered Models. These efforts have yielded significant progress,” Lutnick wrote.
However, the administration stopped short of permitting a broader rollout of the model and offered no comment on the fate of Claude Fable 5, the consumer-facing version released with additional safeguards. Lutnick noted that other requirements outlined in the initial directive sent on June 12 remain in effect.
“We received notice from the US government that Mythos 5, our strongest cybersecurity model, can be redeployed to a small group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers,” Anthropic spokesperson Eduardo Maia Silva said. “We are working to provision the approved set of providers and restore their access to Mythos 5 as quickly as possible. We are pleased to see this progress and continue to work with the government to expand access to Mythos 5 and make Fable 5 available for general use again.”
Anthropic is still in discussions with the White House about restoring access to Fable 5, talks expected to continue over the weekend. Both parties hope the resolution of this incident will help inform a lasting policy framework for future model releases.
The partial reinstatement
The partial reinstatement comes roughly two weeks after the White House sent an export control directive requiring the company to limit foreign nationals from accessing Mythos and Fable 5, including people working and living in the United States. In response, Anthropic disabled access to the models entirely. In his latest letter, Lutnick wrote that organisations approved to use Mythos may now allow their foreign national employees to access the model, and Anthropic may do the same for its own foreign national employees.
The Trump administration grew concerned about Anthropic’s rollout of Mythos after it learned the company granted access to a South Korean telecommunications firm it believed had ties to China. Amazon and the National Security Agency also separately raised concerns to the White House that Fable 5 could be jailbroken, and the confluence of events convinced officials they needed to take action.
In recent weeks, Anthropic sent senior members from its cybersecurity and AI safety teams to Washington, DC to meet with Trump administration officials. Along with Brown, Anthropic’s public policy chief Sarah Heck have been leading the company’s discussions with the US Department of Commerce.
Getting Mythos 5 back online marks a promising step forward for Anthropic and the White House, but the saga has raised broader questions about the overall direction of US AI policy, particularly the extent to which the Trump administration will seek to control future model releases. On Friday, OpenAI announced it was delaying the release of its upcoming GPT 5.6 models in response to a request from the Trump administration.
Dean Ball, head of the strategic futures team at OpenAI and a former White House AI adviser, said in a June 16 blog post that Anthropic’s latest spat with the Trump administration has shown frontier AI model developers they “need an explicit green light from the government now.”
Anthropic’s battles with the White House have been costly for the young company’s business. It sued the Trump administration earlier this year over a supply chain risk designation it received after trying to draw red lines around how military contractors could use its AI models. After the White House sent its export directive on the Friday evening of June 12, some Anthropic investors worked through the weekend to determine what it meant for Anthropic’s corporate future.
What it means
For the people building and deploying these systems, the outcome creates a clearer path for enterprise use but leaves consumer access in limbo. Developers at approved organisations can now run Mythos 5 again, while Fable 5 remains blocked until a final agreement is reached. The situation signals that future releases may require explicit government approval before launch.
