The US has removed the export licence requirement that barred Anthropic from sharing its Mythos and Fable models abroad.
Public access to these systems is scheduled to return on Wednesday, July 1.
On June 12, the US government added the products to its list of restricted technologies. This move meant they could no longer be offered to foreign nationals without special approval. Complying with that rule proved impractical at scale, so Anthropic ended public access to the models.
After weeks of talks, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models. The company will work diligently with the U.S. government on protocols and standards for Mythos, Fable and future models. It also agreed to inform the US government of any malicious activity.
Anthropic had already publicly pledged to do much of this voluntarily, months before the export rule existed. That is part of why cybersecurity experts were skeptical of the restrictions in the first place. To them, the ban looked less like a security fix and more like a way for the Trump administration to punish Anthropic for its executives’ public criticism of how the government, and the president’s political opponents, might use the technology.
Mythos was originally made available to a select group of organisations beginning in April to allay concerns about its ability to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in software. A version called Fable was released to the public in June with additional security guardrails.
However, Asian AI companies began releasing their own models approaching Mythos-level capabilities. Among them are Fugu and Tulonfeng. The US government was under pressure to ease its restrictions on Anthropic to ensure that American AI could compete globally.
Last week, Lutnick cleared Mythos to be released to select customers approved by the White House. OpenAI’s latest models were also released to a group of organisations approved by the Trump team, instead of the public.
The Trump administration’s erratic approach to AI policymaking has left companies across the industry with little clarity about what will govern future model releases. An executive order issued in June that signaled a desire to review models ahead of release was criticised by influential analysts like Dean W. Ball, who recently started a policy position at OpenAI.
What it means
Developers and researchers who rely on Anthropic’s most powerful tools can now expect them to be accessible again, provided they are not subject to the previous export controls. The industry remains uncertain about future regulatory frameworks, though the immediate path forward for these specific models is clearer.
