The US government removed foreign access restrictions on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos AI models, clearing it for wider distribution after the AI company resolved the Trump administration’s safety controls, less than three weeks after the company was ordered to suspend access to its most advanced AI models over national security risks.
On June 12, the Commerce Department imposed an export control rule via a private letter requiring the company to obtain US permission before allowing any foreign national, regardless of location, to access those two models and before it could be sent to any destination worldwide. In response, the AI company disabled its powerful Mythos 5 AI model and Fable 5, a similar model intended for wider release.
Then after several days of discussions between Anthropic and the Trump admin, late on Tuesday, Anthropic said in a post on X that 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.
“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.
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.
Anthropic said it would restore access to users beginning Wednesday.
In a letter to Anthropic viewed by Bloomberg, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Anthropic had pledged to “proactively deter and address security risks associated with the models.” On Tuesday evening, Lutnick tweeted that "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."
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 consequences may still have last impact, as they spotlighted governance risks for Anthropic just as the company is charting its initial public offering.
As AI influencer Alex Finn pointed out, the crackdown on both Chinese models and frontier US models will likely prompt more consumers to roll out their own local models.
As Bloomberg notes, the move to relax the restrictions also relieves tension that was weighing on Anthropic’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.