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The US government has eased the restrictions it imposed on Anthropic’s most advanced AI model, Claude Mythos 5, allowing the company to grant access to more than 100 US organizations, including large corporations and government agencies.
In a letter sent to Anthropic’s cofounder and chief compute officer Tom Brown obtained by WIRED, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told the AI lab it would permit certain trusted partners to access Mythos because he had “determined that appropriate safeguards are in place.” Semafor first reported the existence of the letter.
“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 government stopped short of permitting a broader rollout of the model, and said nothing about the fate of Claude Fable 5, the consumer-facing version of Mythos that Anthropic released with significant additional safeguards. Lutnick noted in his letter that the other requirements outlined in the initial directive he 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 in a statement to WIRED. “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.”
The partial reinstatement comes roughly two weeks after the White House sent an export control directive to Anthropic that required the company to limit foreign nationals from accessing Claude Mythos and Fable 5, including people working and living in the United States. In his latest letter, Lutnick wrote that organizations 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, WIRED previously reported. After Amazon and the National Security Agency raised concerns that Fable 5 could be jailbroken, the Trump administration became convinced it 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 entire 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 evening of June 12, WIRED previously reported that some Anthropic investors worked through the weekend to determine what it meant for Anthropic’s corporate future.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
English (US) ·