Trump administration lifts restrictions on Anthropic's Fable 5
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The Trump administration lifted export controls on Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 AI model Tuesday evening, with access returning to customers Wednesday, Anthropic said.
Why it matters: The move, eagerly awaited by AI developers, restores public access to the company's powerful Mythos-class model that had been pulled for security reasons 18 days ago.
Driving the news: Last week, the Trump administration allowed Anthropic to restore access to Mythos 5 for a select group of government-approved organizations.
- Sources also told Axios last week that Fable 5 could return as soon as this week.
The big picture: The U.S. government's desired role in regulating and evaluating frontier AI models before release is still up in the air — creating an ad hoc regulatory environment for AI companies.
- OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.6 to only a small set of approved customers last week after a request from the U.S. government. Anthropic's Mythos 5 is similarly being released to a group of government-approved customers.
What they're saying: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Tuesday in a post on X that his office had "worked closely with Anthropic to analyze and approve Fable 5 to ensure alignment across the US Government and strengthen America's leadership in AI."
- "We're grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models," Anthropic said on X.
- White House chief of staff Susie Wiles wrote on X that the government and private sector have "worked together in a way we have never seen before and this foundation of America First is unprecedented."
Zoom in: Anthropic says that it worked closely with the government to implement a new safeguard that blocks the jailbreak that officials were worried about 99% of the time.
- In the other cases, Fable's output only included previously discovered or already patched security flaws, the company said.
- However, the new safeguard could result in Fable flagging more benign requests.
- Commerce's Center for AI Standards and Innovation also tested the model's previous and new safeguards, according to Anthropic.
Threat level: U.S. officials, allies and leading AI companies have become increasingly concerned that frontier models could be misused to automate sophisticated cyberattacks or accelerate biological weapons development.
- At the same time, China is moving closer to producing its own Mythos competitor while continuing to release open-weight models that rival models like Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8.
What's next: The Trump administration faces an August deadline under a recent executive order to create standardized benchmarks for evaluating the security risks of new AI models.
Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional details throughout.
